Machines Like Me

TWO

Several weeks passed before Miranda was able to work on her share of Adam’s character. Her father was ill and she made frequent journeys to Salisbury to look after him. She had a paper to write on nineteenth-century Corn Law reform and its impact on a single street in a town in Herefordshire. The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.

None of this seemed so unreasonable to me, or all that interesting. I didn’t say so. I wanted to encourage Miranda in everything she did or thought. Love is generous. Besides, it suited me to think that whatever had once happened was no more than its evidence. In the new dispensation, the past weighed less. I was in the process of remaking myself and eager to forget my own recent history. My foolish choices were behind me. I saw a future with Miranda. I was approaching the shores of early middle age, and I was taking stock. I lived daily with the accumulated historical evidence my past had bequeathed, evidence I intended to obliterate: my loneliness, relative poverty, poor living quarters and diminished prospects. Where I stood in relation to the means of production and the rest was a blank to me. Nowhere, I preferred to think.

Was my purchase of Adam more proof of failure? I wasn’t sure. Waking in the small hours – next to Miranda, her place or mine – I summoned in the darkness a lever of the sort found by old railway tracks that would shunt Adam back to the store and return the money to my account. By daylight the matter was more diffuse or nuanced. I hadn’t told Miranda that Adam had spoken against her, and I hadn’t told Adam that Miranda was to have a hand in his personality – a punishment of sorts. I despised his warning about her, but his mind fascinated me – if a mind was what he had. His appearance was thuggishly handsome, he could put on his own socks and he was a technical miracle. He was expensive but this child of the Wiring Club could not let him go.

Working on the old computer in my bedroom, out of Adam’s sight, I typed in my own choices. I decided that answering every other question would be a sufficiently random kind of merging – our home-made genetic shuffling. Now I had a method and a partner, I relaxed into the process, which began to take on a vaguely erotic quality; we were making a child! Because Miranda was involved, I was protected from self-replication. The genetic metaphor was helpful. Scanning the lists of idiotic statements, I more or less chose approximations of myself. Whether Miranda did the same, or something different, we would end up with a third person, a new personality.

I wasn’t going to sell Adam, but the ‘malicious liar’ remark rankled. In studying the manual, I’d read about the kill switch. Somewhere on the nape of his neck, just below the hairline, was a mole. If I were to lay a finger on it for three seconds or so, then increase the pressure, he would be powered down. Nothing, no files, memories or skills, would be lost. That first afternoon with Adam I’d been reluctant to touch his neck or any part of him, and held back until late in the day after my successful dinner with Miranda. I’d spent the afternoon at my screen losing £111. I went into the kitchen where the dishes, pots and pans were piled in the sink. As a test of his competence I could have asked Adam to clear up, but I was in a strange, elevated state that day. Everything to do with Miranda glowed, even her nightmare that had woken me in the small hours. The plate I had put before her, the lucky fork that had been in and out of her mouth, the pale bowed shape where her lips had kissed her wine glass were mine alone to handle and cleanse. And so I began.

Behind me, Adam was in place at the table, gazing towards the window. I finished and was drying my hands on a tea towel as I went over to him. Despite my sunny mood, I could not forgive his disloyalty. I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. There were boundaries of ordinary decency he needed to learn – hardly a challenge for his neural networks. His heuristic shortcomings had encouraged my decision. When I had learned more, when Miranda had done her share, he could come back into our lives.

I kept a friendly tone. ‘Adam, I’m switching you off for a while.’

His head turned towards me, paused, tilted, then tilted the other way. It was some designer’s notion of how consciousness might manifest itself in movement. It would come to irritate me.

He said, ‘With all respect, I think that’s a bad idea.’

‘It’s what I’ve decided.’

‘I’ve been enjoying my thoughts. I was thinking about religion and the afterlife.’

‘Not now.’

‘It occurred to me that those who believe in a life beyond this one will—’

‘That’s enough. Hold still.’ I reached over his shoulder. His breath was warm on my arm, which, I supposed, he could snap with ease. The manual quoted in bold Isaac Asimov’s tirelessly reiterated First Law of Robotics, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’

I couldn’t find what I wanted by touch. I walked behind Adam and there, as described, right on the hairline was the mole. I put my finger on it.

‘Might we talk about this first?’

‘No.’ I pressed and with the faintest, whirring sigh he slumped. His eyes remained open. I fetched a blanket to cover him up.

In the days that followed this powering-down, two questions preoccupied me: would Miranda fall in love with me? And would French-made Exocet missiles scupper the British fleet when it came within range of Argentinian fighter jets? When I was falling asleep, or in the mornings while I lingered a few seconds in the foggy no-man’s-land between dreaming and waking, the questions merged, the air-to-ship missiles became arrows of love.

What was disarming and curious about Miranda was the ease that settled round her choices, the way she abandoned herself to the flow of events. That evening she came to supper, and after a pleasant two hours eating and drinking, we made love, having closed the bedroom door on Adam. Then we talked into the night. Just as easily, she could have kissed me on the cheek after the chicken with tarragon and retreated upstairs to her own bed and read a history book before falling asleep. What for me was momentous, the immediate, astonishing fulfilment of my hopes, was for her enjoyable and entirely unsurprising, a pleasant extra course after the coffee. Like chocolates. Or a good grappa. Neither my nakedness nor my tenderness had the effect on her that hers, in all their glorious sweetness, had on me. And I was in decent shape – good muscle tone, full head of dark brown hair – and generous, resourceful, some had been kind enough to say. I played a decent hand in pillow talk. She hardly seemed to notice how well we got along, how one topic, one harmless running joke, one mood-tone succeeded another. My self-esteem allowed that this was how it must have been with everyone she had known. I suspected that our first night together barely entered her thoughts the following day.

I could hardly complain when the second night followed the pattern of the first, except that she cooked for me and we slept in her bed, and on the third, in mine – and so on. For all our carefree physical intimacy, I never spoke about my feelings in case I prompted her to admit she had none of her own. I preferred to wait, to let things build, let her feel free until she realised that she wasn’t, that she was in love with me and it was too late to turn back.

There was vanity in this expectation. After a week or so there was anxiety. I’d been glad to switch Adam off. Now, I wondered about reactivating him to ask about his warning, his reasons, his sources. But I couldn’t let a machine have such a hold over me, which was what would happen if I granted it the role of confidant, counsellor, oracle, in my most private affairs. I had my pride and I believed that Miranda was incapable of a malicious lie.

And yet. I despised myself for doing it, but ten days into the affair I began my own investigations. Apart from the much-discussed notion of ‘machine-intuition’, Adam’s only possible source was the Internet. I trawled through the social media sites. There were no accounts under her name. She lived in the reflections of her friends. So there she was, at parties or on holidays, carrying a friend’s daughter on her shoulders at a zoo, gum-booted on a farm, linking arms or dancing or romping in the pool with a succession of bare-chested boyfriends, with boisterous crowds of teenage girlfriends, with drunken undergraduates. All who knew her liked her. No one on any accessible site had a sinister story. Now and then the chatter endorsed parts of the past she was recounting in our midnight conversations. Elsewhere, her name came up in connection with the one academic paper she had published – ‘Pannage in Swyncombe: the role of the half-wild pig in the household economies of a medieval Chilterns village’. When I read it, I loved her more.

As for the intuitive artificial mind, it was pure urban legend, begun in early 1968 when Alan Turing and his brilliant young colleague, Demis Hassabis, devised software to beat one of the world’s great masters of the ancient game of go in five straight games. Everyone in the business knew that such a feat could not be accomplished by number-crunching force. The possible moves in go and chess vastly exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe, and go has exponentially more moves than chess. Go masters are unable to explain how they attain their supremacy beyond a profound sense of what feels right for any given situation on the board. So it was assumed that the computer was doing something similar. Breathless articles in the press announced a new era of humanised software. Computers were on the threshold of thinking like us, imitating our often ill-defined reasons for our judgements and choices. In a counter-move and in a pioneering spirit of open access, Turing and Hassabis put their software online. In media interviews they described the process of machine deep learning and neural networks. Turing attempted layman explanations of the Monte Carlo tree search, an algorithm elaborated during the forties’ Manhattan Project to develop the first atom bomb. He became famously irritable when he attempted, overambitiously, to explain PSPACE-complete mathematics to an impatient television interviewer. Less well known was his loss of temper on an American cable channel as he described a problem central to computer science, P versus NP. He was in front of a combative studio audience of ordinary ‘folk’. He had recently published his solution, which mathematicians around the world were then checking. As a problem it was easy to state, formidably difficult to resolve. Turing was trying to suggest that a correct positive solution would initiate exciting discoveries in biology as well as in concepts of space and time and creativity. The audience did not share or understand his excitement. They had only a dim awareness of his role in the Second World War, or of his influence on their own computer-dependent lives. They regarded him as the perfect English gentleman egghead and enjoyed tormenting him with stupid questions. The unhappy episode marked the end of his mission to popularise his field.

Before the confrontation with the nine-dan Japanese go master, the Turing–Hassabis computer played thousands of matches against itself continuously for a year. It learned from experience, and it was the scientists’ claim – reasonable enough – to have come a step closer to approximating human general intelligence that gave rise to the legend of machine intuition. Nothing they said could bring the untethered story back to earth.

Commentators who suggested that the computer’s victory would make the game extinct were wrong. After his fifth defeat, the elderly go master, helped by an assistant, stood slowly, bowed towards the laptop and congratulated it in a trembling voice. He said, ‘The mounted horse did not kill athletics. We run for joy.’ He was right. The game, with its simple rules and boundless complexity, became even more popular. As with the post-war defeat of a chess grandmaster, the triumph of the machine could not diminish the game. Winning, it was said, was less important than pleasure in the intricacies of the contest. But the idea that there was now software that could eerily, accurately ‘read’ a situation, or a face, a gesture or the emotional timbre of a remark was never dislodged and partly explained the interest when the Adams and Eves came on the market.

Fifteen years is a long time in computer science. The processing power and sophistication of my Adam was far greater than the go computer. The technology advanced and Turing moved on. He spent concentrated time looking at decision-making and wrote a celebrated book: we are disposed to make patterns, narratives, when we should be thinking probabilistically if we want to make good choices. Artificial intelligence could improve on what we had, on what we were. Turing devised the algorithms. All his innovative work was available to others. Adam must have benefited.

Turing’s institute drove forward AI and computational biology. He said he wasn’t interested in becoming richer than he already was. Hundreds of prominent scientists followed his example on open-source publication which would lead, in 1987, to the collapse of the journals Nature and Science. He was much criticised for that. Others said that his work had created tens of thousands of jobs around the world in diverse fields – computer graphics, medical scanning devices, particle accelerators, protein folding, smart electricity distribution, defence, space exploration. No one could guess the end of such a list.

By living openly from 1969 with his lover, Tom Reah, the theoretical physicist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1989, Turing helped give weight to a gathering social revolution. When the AIDS epidemic broke out he raised a huge sum to set up a virology institute in Dundee and was co-founder of a hospice. After the first effective treatments appeared, he campaigned for short licences and low prices, especially in Africa. He continued to collaborate with Hassabis, who had run his own group since 1972. Turing gradually lost patience with public engagements, so he said, and preferred to concentrate on his work in ‘my shrinking years’. Behind him were his long residency in San Francisco, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a banquet in his honour with President Carter, lunch with Mrs Thatcher at Chequers to discuss science funding, dinner with the President of Brazil to persuade him to protect the Amazon. For a long while, he was the face of the computer revolution, and the voice of the new genetics, almost as famous as Stephen Hawking. Now he was a near-recluse. His only journeys were between his house in Camden Town and his Institute in King’s Cross, two doors down from the Hassabis Centre.

Reah wrote a long poem about his and Turing’s life together, published in the TLS and then in book form. The poet and critic Ian Hamilton said in a review, ‘Here is a physicist who can imagine as well as scan. Now bring me the poet who can explain quantum gravity.’ When Adam appeared in my life, I believed that only a poet, not a machine, could tell me if Miranda would ever love me, or lie to me.

There must have been Turing algorithms buried in the software of the Exocet series 8 missiles that a French company, MBDA, had sold to the Argentine government. This fearsome weapon, once fired from a jet in the general direction of a ship, could recognise its profile and decide mid-flight whether it was hostile or friendly. If the latter, it aborted its mission and plunged harmlessly into the sea. If it missed its target and overshot, it was able to double back and make two more attempts. It closed on its prey at 5,000 miles an hour. Its opt-out capacity was probably based on face-recognition software that Turing developed in the mid-sixties. He had been looking for ways to help people with prosopagnosia, a condition in which sufferers are unable to recognise familiar faces. Government immigration control, defence companies and security firms raided the work for their own purposes.

Since France was a NATO partner, strong representations were made to the Elysée Palace by our government that MBDA should be prevented from selling more Exocets or from providing technical assistance. A consignment bound for Peru, Argentina’s ally, was blocked. But other countries, including Iran, were willing to sell. There was also a black market. British agents, posing as arms dealers, bought up the supply.

But the spirit of the free market was irrepressible. The Argentinian military desperately needed help with the Exocet software, which had not been fully installed by the time the conflict began. Two Israeli experts, acting on their own, presumably on the offer of huge financial reward, flew to Argentina. It was never discovered who cut their throats in a Buenos Aires hotel. Many assumed it was British intelligence agents. If so, they were too late. On the day the young Israelis bled to death in their beds, four British ships were sunk, the next day another three went down, and on the third, another. In all, an aircraft carrier, destroyers, frigates and a troop carrier were sunk. The loss of life was in the low thousands. Sailors, troops, cooks, doctors and nurses, journalists. After days of confusion, with all military efforts concentrated on rescuing survivors, the rump of the Task Force turned back and the Falkland Islands became Las Malvinas. The fascist junta that ruled Argentina was jubilant, its popularity soared, its murder, torture and disappearances of its citizens were forgotten or forgiven. Its hold on power was consolidated.

I watched it all, horrified – and guilty. Having thrilled to the sight of the warships filing down the English Channel, despite my opposition to the venture, I was implicated, along with nearly everyone else. Mrs Thatcher came out of 10 Downing Street to make a statement. First she couldn’t speak, then she was tearful, but refused to be helped back inside. Finally, she recovered and, in an untypically small voice, made the famous ‘I take it on my shoulders’ speech. She assumed full responsibility. She would never outlive the shame. She offered her resignation. But the shock to the nation of so many deaths was profound and there was no appetite for heads to roll. If she had to go, so did her entire cabinet, and most of the country. A leader in the Telegraph put it thus: ‘The failure belongs to us all. This is not the occasion for scapegoats.’ A very British process began, reminiscent of the Dunkirk disaster, by which a terrible defeat was transformed into a mournful victory. National unity was all. Six weeks later, 1.5 million people were in Portsmouth to greet the returning ships with their cargoes of corpses, their burned and traumatised passengers. The rest of us watched it on television in horror.

I repeat this well-known history for the benefit of younger readers who won’t be aware of its emotional impact, and because it formed a melancholy background to our three-cornered household. The rent was due and I was concerned by a loss of income. There was no mass purchase of hand-held Union Jacks, champagne consumption was down, and the general economy was in trouble, though pubs and hamburgers went on as before. Miranda was lost to her father’s illness and to the Corn Laws and the historical viciousness of vested interests, their indifference to suffering. Meanwhile, Adam remained under the blanket. Miranda’s delay in starting work on him was in part due to technophobia, if that’s the word for disliking being online and ticking boxes with a mouse. I nagged, and finally she agreed to make a start. A week after the remains of the Task Force returned to port, I set up the laptop on the kitchen table and brought up Adam’s site. It wasn’t necessary to wake him for her to begin. She picked up the cordless mouse, turned it over and stared at its underside with distaste. I made her coffee and went into the bedroom to work.

My portfolio had halved in value. I was supposed to be recouping losses. But the thought of her next door was a distraction. As so often in the mornings, I dwelt on our night before. The misery enveloping the country had made it all the more intense. Then we had talked. She described at length her childhood, an idyll shattered by her mother’s death when she was eight. She wanted to take me to Salisbury and show me the important locations. I took this as a sign of progress but she had yet to suggest a date, and she hadn’t said that she wanted me to meet her father.

I was facing my screen without seeing it. The walls and especially the door were thin. She was making very slow progress. At long intervals, I made out a deliberate click as she registered a choice. The silence between made me tense. Open to experience? Conscientious? Emotionally stable? After an hour I was getting nowhere and decided to go out. I kissed the top of her head as I squeezed past her chair. I left the house and set off towards Clapham.

It was unusually hot for April. The traffic down Clapham High Street was heavy, the pavements were crowded. Everywhere, black ribbons. The idea had crossed from the United States. On lamp posts and doors, in shop windows, on car door handles and aerials, on pushchairs, wheelchairs and bikes. In central London, on official buildings where Union Jacks were at half mast, black ribbons dangled from the flag poles for the 2,920 dead. Black ribbons were worn as armbands and on lapels – I was wearing one myself and so was Miranda. I would find one for Adam. Women and girls and flamboyant men tied them in their hair. The passionate minority who had argued and marched against the invasion wore them too. For public figures, and celebrities, including the royal family, it was hazardous not to wear one – the popular press was keeping watch.

I had no ambition but to walk off my restless state. I increased my pace through the business end of the High Street. I passed the boarded-up office of the Anglo-Argentinian Friendship Society. A rubbish collectors’ walkout was in its second week. The bags piled round lamp posts were waist-high and the heat was generating a sweet stench. The public, or its press, agreed with the prime minister, that a strike at such a time was an act of heartless disloyalty. But the wage demands were as inevitable as the next rise in inflation. No one knew yet how to dissuade the snake from eating its tail. Very soon, perhaps by the end of the year, stoical robots of negligible intelligence would be picking up the rubbish. The men they displaced would be even poorer. Unemployment was at sixteen per cent.

By the curry house and along the greasy pavement outside the fast-food chains, the smell of rotting meat was a force that hit the chest. I held my breath until I was past the Tube station. I crossed the road and walked onto the Common. There were shouts and squeals rising from a crowd by the boating and paddling pool. Even some of the kids splashing about were wearing ribbons. It was a happy scene but I didn’t linger. In these new times a solitary man had to be wary of seeming to stare at children.

So I strolled over to Holy Trinity Church, a huge brick Age of Reason shed. There was no one inside. As I sat, hunched forward, elbows on knees, I could have been mistaken for a worshipper. It was too reasonable a place to evoke much awe, but its clean lines and sensible proportions were soothing. I was content to stay a while in the cool gloom and let my thoughts drift back to our very first night together when I’d been woken by a prolonged howl. I thought a dog was in the room and I was half out of bed before I came to and realised that Miranda was having a nightmare. It wasn’t easy to wake her. She was struggling, as if fighting with someone, and twice she mumbled, ‘Don’t go in. Please.’ Afterwards, I thought it would help her to describe the dream. She was lying on my arm, clinging to me tightly. When I asked her again, she shook her head, and soon she was asleep.

In the morning, over coffee, she shrugged my question away. Just a dream. That moment of evasion stood out because Adam was behind us, making a good job of cleaning the window, which I had told him, rather than asked him, to do. While we were talking, he had paused and turned, as if intrigued to hear an account of a nightmare. I wondered then if he himself was subject to dreams. He was on my conscience now. My command that morning had been snappish. I shouldn’t have treated him like a servant. Later that day I had powered him down. I had left him switched off too long. Holy Trinity Church was associated with William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement. He would have promoted the cause of the Adams and Eves, their right not to be bought and sold and destroyed, their dignity in self-determination. Perhaps they could take care of themselves. Soon, they’d be doing the dustmen’s jobs. Doctors and lawyers were next in line. Pattern recognition and faultless memory were even easier to compute than gathering up the city’s filth.

We could become slaves of time without purpose. Then what? A general renaissance, a liberation into love, friendship and philosophy, art and science, nature worship, sports and hobbies, invention and the pursuit of meaning? But genteel recreations wouldn’t be for everyone. Violent crime had its attractions too, so did bare-knuckle cage-fighting, VR pornography, gambling, drink and drugs, even boredom and depression. We wouldn’t be in control of our choices. I was proof of that.

I wandered out across the open spaces of the Common. Fifteen minutes later I reached the far side and decided to turn back. By now, Miranda should have made at least a third of her decisions. I was impatient to be with her before she set off for Salisbury. She would be back late that night. I was resting from the heat in the narrow shade of a silver birch. A few yards away was a fenced-in little swing park for children. A small boy – I guessed he was about four years old – dressed in baggy green shorts, plastic sandals and a stained white t-shirt, was bent over by a see-saw examining an object on the ground. He tried to dislodge it with his foot, then he crouched down and got his fingers to it.

I hadn’t noticed his mother sitting on a bench with her back to me. She called out sharply, ‘Get here!’

The boy looked up, seemed about to go towards her, then his attention returned to the interesting thing on the ground. Now he had moved, I saw it myself. It was a bottle top, glinting dully, perhaps embedded in the softened tarmac.

The woman’s back was broad, her hair black, curly, thinning towards the crown. In her right hand was a cigarette. Her elbow was cupped in her left hand. Despite the heat, she was wearing a coat. Below the collar was a long tear.

‘D’you hear me?’ The threat was on a rising note. Again, the child looked up and seemed fearful and bound to obey. He took a half-step but, as his gaze shifted, he saw his prize again and faltered. When he went back to it, he may have thought he could lever it free and take it to his mother. But what he may have reasoned didn’t matter. With a yelp of frustration, the woman leaped from the bench, crossed the few yards of playground at speed and dropped her cigarette as she grabbed the boy by his arm and smacked his bare legs. At the instant of his first cry, she smacked him again, and a third time.

I’d been comfortable in my thoughts and was reluctant to be taken from them. For a moment I thought I could head for home, pretending, if not to myself then to the world, that I’d seen nothing. There was nothing I could do about this little boy’s life.

His screams were angering his mother further. ‘Shut up!’ she shouted at him over and over again. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’

Even then, I might have forced myself to ignore the scene. But as the boy’s shrieks grew louder, she seized his shoulders in two hands, pulling his dirty t-shirt clear of his belly, and began to shake him hard.

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought. I found myself jogging towards the playground’s fence, stepping over it, taking three paces and putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

I said, ‘Excuse me. Please. Please don’t do that.’

My voice sounded prissy in my ears, privileged, apologetic, lacking all authority. I was already doubting where this could lead. Not to a future of reformed, kindly parenting. But at least, as she turned towards me in disbelief, her assault had ceased.

‘What was that?’

‘He’s just little,’ I said stupidly. ‘You could do him serious harm.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’

It was the right question and for that reason I didn’t answer it. ‘He’s too little to understand you.’

This conversation was proceeding over the child’s screams. Now he clutched at his mother’s skirts, wanting to be picked up. This was the worst of it. His tormentor was also his only comfort. She was squaring up to me. The dropped cigarette smouldered by her foot. Her right hand clenched and unclenched. Trying to appear not to, I took a vague half-step back. We were staring each other out. It was, or had been, a rather lovely, intelligent face, its obvious beauty marred by weight-gain plumping up the flesh round her eyes, narrowing them into a look of suspicion. In another life it could have been a kindly, maternal face. Rounded, high cheekbones, a slew of freckles across the bridge of her nose, full lips – though the lower was split. After several seconds, I noticed that her pupils were pinpricks. She was the first to shift her gaze. She was looking over my shoulder and then I found out why.

She yelled, ‘Oi, John.’

I turned. Her friend or husband, John, also plump, naked from the waist, bright pink from a bout in the sun, was on his way through the playground’s wire gate.

Still several yards away he called, ‘He bothering you?’

‘Fucking right.’

In some other sector of all imagined possibilities – the cinematic would be one – I needn’t have worried. John was about my age, but shorter, flabbier, less fit, less strong. In that other world, if he’d struck me, I could have floored him. But in this world, I’d never hit another person in my life, not even in childhood. I could have told myself that if I knocked the father down the child would suffer all the more. But that wasn’t it. I had the wrong attitude, or rather, I lacked the right one. It wasn’t fear, it certainly wasn’t lofty principle. When it came to hitting people, I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t want to know.

‘Oh yeah?’

Now John was squaring up to me, the woman having stepped back. The boy continued to wail. Father and son were comically alike – both crop-haired, ginger-blond, with small faces and wide-apart green eyes.

‘With all respect, he’s just little. He shouldn’t be hit or shaken.’

‘With all respect, you can fuck off out of it. Or else.’

And John did look ready to hit me. His chest was puffed out, the ancient self-enlargement ploy of toads and apes and many others. His breathing was rapid and his arms hung well clear of his torso. I may have been stronger, but he would be more reckless. Less to lose. Or this was what bravery was. Being ready to take a chance on not getting felled and your head lifted and slammed down on the tarmac many times, with lifelong neural consequences. A chance I wouldn’t take. This was what cowardice was, a surfeit of imagining.

I raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Look. I can’t make you do anything, obviously. I can only hope to persuade you. For the little boy’s benefit.’

Then John said something so surprising that I was completely outflanked and for a moment could hardly reply.

‘Do you want him?’

‘What?’

‘You can have him. Go on. You’re an expert on kids. He’s yours. Take him home with you.’

The child had gone quiet by this point. Looking at him again, I thought he had something his father lacked, though perhaps not his mother – a faint but still luminous signal in his expression of intelligent engagement, despite his distress. We stood in a tight little group. From far across the Common we heard, above the traffic, the distant shouts of children by the paddling pool.

On an impulse, I called the father’s bluff. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘He can come and live with me. We’ll sort out the paperwork later.’

I took a card from my wallet and gave it to him. Then I put my hand out to the boy and to my surprise he raised his and slotted his fingers between mine. I felt flattered. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Mark.’

‘Come on Mark.’

Together we walked away from his parents, across the playground to the spring-hinged gate.

The little boy said in a loud whisper, ‘Let’s pretend to run away.’ His upturned face was suddenly alive with humour and mischief.

‘OK.’

‘On a boat.’

‘All right.’

I was about to open the gate when there was a shout behind me. I turned, hoping that my relief didn’t show. The woman came running at me, pulled the boy away and swung at me with an open hand. The blow fell harmlessly against my upper arm.

‘Pervert!’

She was ready to take another swing when John called out in a weary tone. ‘Leave it.’

I let myself out and walked a little way before stopping to look back. John was hoisting Mark onto his raw shoulders. I had to admire the father. There may have been wit in his methods which I’d failed to notice. He had got rid of me without a fight by making an impossible offer. What a nightmare, to drag the boy back to my tiny place, introduce him to Miranda, then see to his needs for the next fifteen years. I noticed that the woman had a black ribbon tied to the arm of her coat. She was trying to persuade John to take his shirt. He was ignoring her. As the family crossed the playground, Mark turned in my direction and raised an arm, perhaps to maintain his balance, perhaps in farewell.

In our side-by-side conversations in bed, often in the early hours, a figure presided whose form was becoming clearer as he hovered before us in the darkness, an unfortunate ghost. I had to overcome an initial impulse to regard him as a rival, hostile to my very existence. I looked him up online and saw his face through time, from early twenties to mid-fifties, evolving from girlishly handsome to appealingly ruined. I read his press, which was not extensive. His name meant nothing to me. A couple of my friends knew of him but had never read him. A profile, five years old, dismissed him as ‘an almost-man’. Since the phrase described one of my own possible fates, I warmed a little to Maxfield Blacke, and understood the obvious – that to love the daughter would be to embrace the father. Whenever she returned from Salisbury, she needed to talk about him. I learned about his different pains, or agonies, the shifting prognoses, the arrogant, ignorant doctor followed by the kind and brilliant doctor, the chaotic hospital with surprisingly good food, the treatments and medications, the fresh hopes abandoned then restored. His mind, she found countless ways of saying, remained sharp. It was his body that had turned against him, against itself, with the ferocity of a civil war. How it hurt the daughter to see the writer’s tongue disfigured by ugly black spots. How it hurt the father to eat, to swallow, to speak. His immune system was letting or taking him down.

There was more. He passed a large kidney stone, as excruciating, Miranda believed, as natural childbirth. He broke a hip on the bathroom floor. His skin itched intolerably. Now he had gout in the joints of both thumbs. Reading, his passion, was made difficult as cataracts clouded his vision. The operation was ahead of him, though he hated and feared anyone messing with his eyes. There may have been other afflictions too humiliating to recount. The woman he should have asked long ago to be his fourth wife had walked out two years ago. Maxfield was alone, dependent on health visitors, strangers, and on his daughter, ninety miles distant. His two sons by another marriage sometimes travelled from London, bringing presents of wine, cheese, biographies, the latest wristwatch computer. But they were squeamish about their father’s intimate care.

We weren’t old enough, Miranda and I, to understand fully that a man in his late fifties was still too young to expect or deserve such multiple insults. But his resemblance to Job tortured by his pitiless God made it seem blasphemous to do anything but listen to Miranda. The night after my encounter in the playground stood out. Hard to believe of a man in love, but my mind wandered as she talked about him. She was just back from Salisbury, describing a fresh torment as we lay in bed. Sympathetically, I took her hand as she talked. The constant sufferings of a man I had never met could only hold me so long. Half listening, I was free to contemplate my life’s strange new turns.

Downstairs, still on the same hard wooden chair, my interesting toy waited under its blanket, its merged personality installed that afternoon while it slept. The adventure was about to begin. At my side was my future, I was sure of it. The imbalance in our feelings for each other would be righted. We were simply the embodiment of a pattern in modern manners: acquaintance, followed by sex, then friendship, finally love. There was no good reason we should travel this conventional course at the same speed. Patience was all.

Meanwhile, surrounding my islet of hopes was an ocean of national sorrow. With ghastly timing, the junta had raised that day 406 Argentine flags in Port Stanley, one for each of their dead, and staged a military parade along the deserted, sodden main street, while in London, in St Paul’s, a commemoration service was held for our 3,000. I watched it on television after I returned from the Common. There could hardly have been two dozen in that vast congregation of the ruling elite who thought that a God who preferred fascism to the Union Jack was worth the candle; or that the departed reposed in eternal bliss. But secular tradition couldn’t provide such familiar verses polished to a gleam by the long-discarded sincerity of previous generations. Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live. So the hymns were sung, the impenetrable, echoing readings intoned, the responses returned in ragged unison, while the rest of us mourned at the altars of our TV sets. Unlike Miranda, I mourned too.

With a million and a half others I had ‘marched’ through central London to protest against the Task Force. In fact, we crept along, stopping to wait at many bottlenecks. The usual paradox held: the matter was grave, the demonstration joyous. Rock bands, jazz bands, drums and trumpets, witty banners, wild costumes, circus skills, speeches, and above all the exhilaration of such numbers, taking hours to file past, so diverse, so clearly decent. So easy to believe that the whole nation had invaded London to make the obvious point that the coming war was unjust, inhumane, illogical, potentially catastrophic. We couldn’t know just how right we were. Or how effectively Parliament, the tabloids, the military and two-thirds of the nation would dismiss us. It was said we were unpatriotic, defending a fascist regime and opposing the rule of international law.

Where was Miranda that day? We barely knew each other then. She was in the library, making the final changes to her half-wild pigs paper. She had unusual ideas about the Task Force for someone in her twenties, and she distrusted the spirit of what she called a ‘self-loving crowd’, its easy like-mindedness, its stupid high spirits. She didn’t share my aptitude for protest or sentiment. She was not interested in watching the ships leave, or in what came to be known as The Sinking, or the inglorious return and still less the service in St Paul’s. Where I had talked with friends about nothing else for months and read every opinion on the affair, Miranda stayed away. When the ships sank, she was silent. When the black ribbons appeared, she wore one, but she wouldn’t be drawn. As she put it, the whole episode ‘stank’.

Now, as I lay beside her with her hand in mine, the orange street lights beyond the curtains gave her bedroom the appearance of a stage set. She had taken the last train home and waited for a delayed Tube to Clapham North. It was almost three o’clock. She was describing how Maxfield had told her ruefully that the gout in his thumbs was a blessing. The pain was so ferocious and localised that his other complaints had faded.

I was still holding her hand. I said, ‘You know how much I want to meet him. Let me come with you next time.’

Several seconds passed before she drowsily replied. ‘I’d like to go very soon.’

‘Good.’

Then, after another pause, ‘Adam must come too.’

She stroked my forearm in a gesture of farewell as she turned on her side, away from me. Soon her breathing was regular and deep, and I was left pondering in the monochrome sodium dusk. He’s coming too. She had assumed joint ownership, just as I’d hoped. But an encounter between Adam and an old-style literary curmudgeon like Maxfield Blacke was hard to envisage. I knew from the profile that he still worked in longhand, detested computers, mobile phones, the Internet and all the rest. Apparently, he didn’t, in that priggish cliché, ‘suffer fools gladly’. Or robots. Adam had yet to be woken. He had yet to leave the house, yet to test his luck as a plausible being capable of small talk. I’d already decided to keep him away from my circle of friends until he was a fully adept social creature. Starting out with Maxfield could disable important sub-routines. Miranda might have been hoping to distract her father and energise his writing. Or it was to do with me, somehow in my interests in ways I didn’t understand. Or – I failed to resist this thought – against them?

That was a bad idea, of the kind that comes in the small hours. Like all insomniac brooding, the essence was repetition. Why should I meet her father in the presence of Adam? Of course, it was entirely in my power to insist on keeping him here. But I would be denying the wishes of a woman whose father lay dying. Was he really dying? Was it possible to get gout in your thumb? Bilaterally? Did I really know Miranda? I lay on my side, seeking a cool corner of the pillow, then on my back with a view of a dappled ceiling that now seemed too close, and yellow rather than orange. I asked myself the same questions, I rephrased them and asked them again. I knew what I was about to do, but I delayed, preferring to fret, denying the obvious for almost an hour. Then at last I got up, pulled on my jeans and t-shirt, let myself out and went barefoot down the communal stairs to my own flat.

In the kitchen I didn’t even pause before pulling the blanket clear. Outwardly nothing had changed – eyes closed, that same bronze face, the nose with its hint of cruelty. I reached behind his head, found the spot and pressed. While he was warming up I ate a bowl of cereal.

Just as I was finishing he said, ‘Never be disappointed.’

‘What was that?’

‘I was saying that those who believe in the afterlife will never be disappointed.’

‘You mean, if they’re wrong they’ll never know about it.’

‘Yes.’

I looked at him closely. Was he different now? He had an expectant look. ‘Logical enough. But Adam. I hope you don’t think that’s profound.’

He didn’t reply. I took my empty bowl to the sink and made myself tea. I sat at the table, across from him, and after taking a couple of sips, I said, ‘Why did you say that I shouldn’t trust Miranda?’

‘Oh that…’

‘Come on.’

‘I spoke out of turn and I’m truly sorry.’

‘Answer the question.’

His voice had changed. It was firmer, more expressive in its varied pitch. But the attitude – I needed more time. My immediate, unreliable impression was of an intact presence.

‘I was thinking only of your best interests.’

‘You just said you were sorry.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘I need to hear why you said what you did.’

‘There’s a small but significant possibility that she might harm you.’

I disguised my irritation and said, ‘How significant?’

‘In the terms set by Thomas Bayes, the eighteenth-century clergyman, I’d say one in five, assuming you accept my values for the priors.’

My father, adept at the harmonic progressions of bebop, was a sincere technophobe. He used to say that any faulty electrical device needed no more than a good thump. I drank my tea and considered. In the colossal array of tree-branching networks that governed Adam’s decision-making, there would be a strong weighting in favour of reasonableness.

I said, ‘I happen to know that the possibility is insignificant, close to zero.’

‘I see. I’m so sorry.’

‘We all make mistakes.’

‘We certainly do.’

‘How many mistakes have you made in your life, Adam?’

‘Only this one.’

‘Then it’s important.’

‘Yes.’

‘And important not to repeat it.’

‘Of course.’

‘So we need to analyse how you came to make it, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I agree.’

‘So, in this regrettable process what was your first move?’

He spoke confidently now, seeming to take pleasure in describing his methods. ‘I have privileged access to all court records, criminal as well as the Family Division, even when in camera. Miranda’s name was anonymised, but I matched the case against other circumstantial factors that are also not generally available.’

‘Clever.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Tell me about the case. And the date and place.’

‘The young man, you see, knew very well that the first time he had intimate relations with her…’

He broke off and stared at me, bug-eyed in astonishment, as though he was taking in my presence for the first time. I guessed my short run of discovery was coming to a close. He appeared now to know about the value of reticence.

‘Go on.’

‘Uh, she brought along a half-bottle of vodka.’

‘Give me a date and place and the man’s name. Quick!’

‘October the… Salisbury. But look—’

Then he began to giggle, a silly, hissing sound. It was embarrassing to witness, but I couldn’t look away. On his face was a complicated look – of confusion, of anxiety, or mirthless hilarity. The user’s handbook claimed that he had forty facial expressions. The Eves had fifty. As far as I knew, the average among people was fewer than twenty-five.

‘Get a grip, Adam. We agreed. We need to understand your mistake.’

It took him more than a minute to get himself under control. I drank the last of my tea and watched what I knew to be a complex process. I understood that personality was not like a shell, encasing and constraining his capacity for coherent thought; that his deviousness, if that was what motivated him, did not live downstream of reason. Nor did mine. His rational impulse to collaborate with me may have pulsed through his neural networks at half the speed of light, but it would not have been suddenly barred at the logic gate of a freshly devised persona. Instead, these two elements were entwined at their origins, like the snakes of Mercury’s caduceus. Adam saw the world and understood it through the prism of his personality; his personality was at the service of his objectifying reason and its constant updates. From the beginning of our conversation, it had been simultaneously in his interests to avoid a repetition of an error and to withhold information from me. When the two became incompatible, he became incapacitated and giggled like a child in church. Whatever we had chosen for him lay far upstream of the branching intricacy of his decision-making. In a different dispensation of character he might simply have fallen silent; in another, he might have been compelled to tell me everything. A case could be made for both.

I now knew a little more than nothing, enough to worry about, not enough to follow up, even if I’d had access to the closed sessions of the courts: Miranda as witness, victim or accused, sex with a young man, vodka, a courtroom, one October in Salisbury.

Adam had fallen silent. His expression, the special material of his face, indistinguishable from skin, relaxed into watchful neutrality. I could have gone upstairs and woken Miranda to confront her with the obvious questions and get everything clear between us. Or I could wait and reflect, holding back what I knew in order to grant myself the illusion of control. A case could be made for both.

But I didn’t hesitate. I went into my bedroom, undressed, leaving my clothes in a heap on my desk, and lay down naked under the summer duvet. It was already light. I would have liked to be soothed and hear, above the dawn chorus, the sound of the milkman going from door to door, clinking his bottles on the steps. But the last of the electric-powered milk floats had vanished from our streets. A shame. Still, I was tired and suddenly comfortable. There’s a special dispensation in the sensuousness of an unshared bed, at least for a while, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.