Machines Like Me

THREE

In the waiting room of the local doctor’s practice, a dozen junk-shop dining-room chairs were arranged round the walls of what had once been a Victorian front parlour. In the centre was a low plywood table with spindly metal legs and a few magazines, greasy to the touch. I had picked one up and immediately put it back. In one corner, some colourful broken toys, a headless giraffe, a car with a missing wheel, gnawed plastic bricks, kindly donated. There were no infants in our group of nine. I was keen to avoid the gaze of the others, their small talk or ailment-swapping. I kept my breathing shallow in case the air around me swarmed with pathogens. I didn’t belong here. I wasn’t ill, my problem was not systemic but peripheral, a toenail. I was the youngest in the room, surely the fittest, a god among mortals, with an appointment not with the doctor but the nurse. I remained beyond mortality’s reach. Decay and death were for others. I expected my name to be called first. It turned out to be a long wait. I was second to last.

On the wall opposite me was a cork noticeboard with fliers promoting early detection of this or that, healthy living, dire warnings. I had time to read them all. A photograph showed an elderly man in cardigan and slippers standing by a window. Without raising a hand to his mouth, he was lustily sneezing in the direction of a laughing little girl. Backlighting illuminated tens of thousands of particles flying towards her – minute droplets of fluid teeming with germs shared by an old fool.

I reflected on the long strange history that lay behind this tableau. The idea that germs were responsible for the spread of disease didn’t gain general acceptance until the 1880s and the work of Louis Pasteur and others, only a hundred years before this poster was devised. Until then, against a few dissenters, the miasma theory prevailed – disease originated in bad air, bad smells, decomposition, or even in night air, against which windows were properly closed. But the device that could have spoken truth to medicine was available 200 years before Pasteur. The amateur scientist of the seventeenth century who knew best how to make and use the device, was known to the scientific elite of London.

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, solid citizen of Delft, a draper and a friend of Vermeer, began sending his observations of microscopic life to the Royal Society in 1673, he revealed a new world and initiated a biological revolution. He meticulously described plant cells and muscle fibre, single-cell organisms, his own spermatozoa, and bacteria from his own mouth. His microscopes needed sunlight and had only a single lens, but no one could grind them the way he could. He was working with magnification powers of 275 and above. By the end of his life, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society had published 190 of his accounts.

Suppose there had been a young spark at the Royal Society lolling in the library after a good lunch, a copy of the Transactions on his lap, who began to speculate that some of these tiny organisms might cause meat to putrefy, or could multiply in the bloodstream and cause disease. There had been such sparks at the Society before and there were many to come. But this one would have needed an interest in medicine as well as scientific curiosity. Medicine and science would not become full partners until well into the twentieth century. Even in the fifties, tonsils were regularly sliced from the throats of healthy children on the basis of standard practice rather than good evidence. A doctor in Leeuwenhoek’s time could easily believe that everything to be known in his field was already well understood. The authority of Galen, active in the second century, was near total. It would be a long time before medical men, in general a grand lot, peered humbly down a microscope in order to learn the basics of organic life.

But our man, whose name will become a household word, is different. His hypotheses will be possible to test. He borrows a microscope – Robert Hooke, honoured fellow of the Society, will surely lend him one – and sets to. A germ theory of disease begins to form. Others join in the research. Perhaps within twenty years surgeons are washing their hands between patients. The reputations of forgotten doctors like Hugh of Lucca and Girolamo Fracastoro are restored. By the mid-eighteenth century, childbirth is safer; certain men and women of genius are born who otherwise would have died in infancy. They might change the course of politics, the arts, the sciences. Loathsome figures who could do great harm also spring up. In minor and possibly major ways, history follows a different course long after our brilliant young member of the Royal Society has grown old and died.

The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise. True of the smallest and largest concerns. How easy to conjure worlds in which my toenail had not turned against me; in which I was rich, living north of the Thames after one of my schemes had succeeded; in which Shakespeare had died in childhood and no one missed him, and the United States had taken the decision to drop on a Japanese city the atomic bomb they had tested to perfection; or in which the Falklands Task Force had not set off, or had returned victorious and the country was not in mourning; in which Adam was an assemblage far-off in the future; or in which 66 million years ago the earth had turned for another few minutes before the meteor struck, so missing the sun-blotting, fine-grained gypsum sand of the Yucatan, allowing the dinosaurs to live on and deny future space to the mammals, clever apes included.

My treatment, when it came at last, began pleasantly with my naked foot soaking in a bowl of hot, soapy water. Meanwhile, the nurse, a large, friendly woman from Ghana, arranged her steel instruments on a tray with her back to me. Her expertise was as complete as her self-confidence. There was no mention of anaesthesia and I was too proud to ask, but when she took my foot onto her aproned lap and set about her business with my ingrowing toenail, I was not too proud to squeak at the crucial moment. Relief was immediate. I made my way along the street, as though on rubber wheels, to my home, the centre of my preoccupations, which had lately shifted from Miranda back to Adam.

His character was in, done, from two sources irreversibly merged. A curious parent of a growing child might wonder which characteristics belonged to the father, which to the mother. I was observing Adam closely. I knew which questions Miranda had answered but I didn’t know what she had decided. I noted that a certain blankness had gone from his face, that he seemed more intact, smoother in his interactions with us and certainly more expressive. But I struggled to understand what it told me about Miranda or, for that matter, about myself. In humans, recombination is infinitely subtle and then, crudely but disarmingly lopsided. The parents merge, like fluids stirred together, but the mother’s face might be faithfully replicated in her child just as the father fails to pass on his gift for comedy. I remembered little Mark’s touching version of his father’s features. But in Adam’s personality, Miranda and I were well shuffled and, as in humans, his inheritance was thickly overlaid by his capacity to learn. Perhaps he had my tendency to pointless theorising. Perhaps he had something of Miranda’s secretive nature and her self-possession, her taste for solitude. Frequently he withdrew into himself, humming or murmuring ‘Ah!’ Then he would pronounce what he took to be an important truth. His interrupted remark about the afterlife was the earliest example.

Another was when we were outside, in my tiny fraction of a back garden, marked off by a broken picket fence. He was helping to pull up weeds. It was just before sunset, the air was still and warm, suffused by an unreal amber light. A week had passed since our late-night exchange. I had brought him outside because his dexterity was still a matter of interest to me. I wanted to watch him handle a hoe and a rake. More generally, my plan was to introduce him to the world beyond the kitchen table. We had friendly neighbours on both sides and there was a chance that he could test his small-talk skills. If we were to travel together to Salisbury to meet Maxfield Blacke, I wanted to prepare Adam by taking him to some shops, and perhaps a pub. I was sure he could pass off as a person, but he needed to be more at ease, his machine-learning capacities needed stretching.

I was keen to see how good he was at identifying plants. Of course, he knew everything. Feverfew, wild carrot, camomile. As he worked, he muttered the names, for his own rather than my benefit. I saw him put on gardening gloves to pull up nettles. Mere mimicry. Later, he straightened and looked with apparent interest towards a spectacular western sky intersected by power and telephone lines and a receding jumble of Victorian roofs. His hands were on his hips and he leaned back, as though his lower back was giving him trouble. He took a deep breath to indicate his appreciation of the evening air. Then, out of nowhere, he said, ‘From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.’

Yes, this was why he needed to be out and about. Buried within his circuitry there was probably a set of sub-routines: sociability/conversation/interesting openers.

But I decided to join in. ‘It’s been said that killing everyone would be a cure for cancer. Utilitarianism can be logically absurd.’

He replied, ‘Obviously!’ in an abrupt manner. I looked at him, surprised, and he turned away from me and bent again to his work.

Adam’s insights, even when valid, were socially inept. On our first expedition away from home, we walked the 200 yards to our local newsagent, Mr Syed. We passed a few people in the street and no one gave Adam a second glance. That was satisfying. Over bare skin he was wearing a tight yellow jumper, knitted by my mother in her last year. He had white jeans and canvas loafers, bought for him by Miranda. She had promised to buy him a complete outfit of his own. With his neat muscular bulge of chest and arms, he could have passed for a personal trainer from the local gym.

Where the pavement narrowed between a tree and a garden wall, I saw how he stood aside to let a woman with a pushchair through.

As we neared the shop he said, somewhat absurdly, ‘It’s good to get out.’

Simon Syed had grown up in a large village thirty miles north of Calcutta. His English teacher at his school had been an Anglophile, a martinet who had beaten into his pupils a courteous and precise English. I had never asked Simon how or why he had taken on a Christian forename. Perhaps a desire to integrate, or the parting insistence of his formidable teacher. He had arrived in north Clapham from Calcutta in his late teens and immediately went to work in his uncle’s shop. Thirty years later, the uncle had died and the shop passed to the nephew, who still supported his aunt from the proceeds. He also supported a wife and three grown-up children, but he didn’t like to talk about them. He was a Muslim, by culture rather than practice. If there was sadness in his life, it was well concealed behind a dignified manner. Now in his mid-sixties, he was sleek, bald, very correct, with a small moustache that tapered to sharp points. There was an anthropology journal, not available on the Internet, that he kept for me. He didn’t mind when I came in to scan the world’s front pages during the Task Force days. He was amused by my taste for low-grade chocolate – those global brands invented between two world wars. In the mid-afternoons, after hours at my screen, I craved sugar.

In that strange way by which one reserves intimacies for a mere acquaintance, I had told Simon about my new girlfriend. When she and I had been in the shop together, he had seen for himself.

Now, whenever I came by, his first question was always, ‘How are matters proceeding?’ He liked to tell me, on the basis of nothing but kindness, ‘It’s clear. Her fate is you. No dodging it! Eternal happiness for you both.’ I sensed that many disappointments were heaped behind him. He was old enough to be my father and wanted for me what had eluded him.

There were no other customers when Adam and I entered the cramped shop with its compound scent of newsprint, peanut dust and cheap toiletries. Simon rose from the wooden chair he sat on behind the till. Because I was not alone, he would not be asking the usual question.

I made the introduction. ‘Simon. My friend Adam.’

Simon nodded. Adam said, ‘Hello,’ and smiled.

I was reassured. A good start. If Simon had noticed the strange appearance of Adam’s eyes, he didn’t show it. It was a common reaction, I would soon discover. People assumed a congenital deformity and politely looked away. Simon and I discussed the cricket – three consecutive sixes and a pitch invasion at the India–England T20 – while Adam stood apart before an array of canned goods on a shelf. They would be instantly familiar to him, their commercial histories, market share, nutritional value. But as we chatted, it was obvious he wasn’t looking at tins of peas, or anything at all. His face was frozen. He hadn’t moved in two minutes. I worried that something unusual or unpleasant was about to happen. Simon politely pretended he hadn’t noticed. It was possible that Adam had put himself in rest mode. I made a mental note: he was in need of an appearance of plausibility whenever doing nothing. His eyes were open, but he failed to blink. Perhaps I had brought him out into the world too soon. Simon would be offended that I had tried to pass off Adam as a person, a friend. It could look like mockery, a tasteless joke. I would have betrayed a pleasant acquaintance.

The cricket banter began to falter. Simon’s gaze settled on Adam, then returned to me. He said tactfully, ‘Your Anthropos is in.’

It was my prompt to go over to the magazines, where Adam stood. Years ago, Simon had cleared his top shelf of soft porn in favour of specialist stuff, literary magazines, academic bulletins of international relations, history, entomology. A fair number of ageing, down-at-heel intellectuals lived in the neighbourhood.

As I turned away he added, ‘You can get it yourself?’ A gentle tease to lower the tension. Simon was taller and he usually reached up for me.

A single word brought Adam to life. With the faintest whirring sound, which I hoped only I could hear, he turned to address Simon in formal terms. ‘Your self, you say. There’s a coincidence. I’ve been giving some thought lately to the mystery of the self. Some say it’s an organic element or process embedded in neural structures. Others insist that it’s an illusion, a by-product of our narrative tendencies.’

There was a silence then, stiffening a little, Simon said, ‘Well, sir, which is it? What have you decided?’

‘It’s the way I’m made. I’m bound to conclude that I’ve a very powerful sense of self and I’m certain that it’s real and that neuroscience will describe it fully one day. Even when it does, I won’t know this self any better than I do now. But I do have moments of doubt when I wonder whether I’m subject to a form of Cartesian error.’

By this time I had the journal in my hands and was preparing to leave. ‘Take the Buddhists,’ Simon said. ‘They prefer to get along without a self.’

‘Indeed. I’d like to meet one. Do you know any?’

Simon was emphatic. ‘No, sir. Absolutely, I do not.’

I raised a hand in farewell and thanks and, taking Adam by his elbow, guided him towards the door.

It was a cliché of romantic love, but no less painful for that: the stronger my feelings, the more remote and unattainable Miranda appeared. How could I complain when she was attained that very first night, after dinner? We had fun, we talked easily, we ate and slept together most nights. But I was greedy for more, though I tried not to show it. I wanted her to open up to me, to want me, need me, show some hunger for me, some delight in me. Instead, my initial impression held – she could take me or leave me. Everything good that passed between us – sex, food, movies, new plays – was instigated by me. Without me she drifted in silence towards her default condition upstairs, to a book on the Corn Laws, a bowl of cereal, a cup of weak herbal tea, curled up in an armchair, barefoot and oblivious. Sometimes, she sat for long periods without a book. If I put my head round her door (we now had keys to each other’s places) and said, ‘How about an hour of frantic sex?’ she would say calmly, ‘OK,’ and we would go into her or my bedroom and she would rise splendidly to her pleasures and mine. When we were done she would take a shower and return to her chair. Unless I suggested something else. A glass of wine, a risotto, an almost famous sax player at a Stockwell pub. OK again.

To everything I proposed, indoors or out, she brought the same tranquil readiness. Happy to hold my hand. But there was something, or many things, I didn’t understand, or she didn’t want me to know about. Whenever she had a seminar or needed to use the library, she returned from college in the late afternoons. Once a week, she came back later. It took me a while to notice that it was always a Friday. Finally she told me that she went to the Regent’s Park Mosque for Friday prayers. That surprised me. But no, she wasn’t thinking of converting from atheism. She had in mind a social-history paper she might write. I wasn’t convinced, but I let it go.

What we lacked was conversational intimacy. We were closest when we argued about the Task Force. When we went to a bar, her conversation was general. She was happy with her solitude or with lively chat about public matters, but there was nothing personal in between, except her father’s health or his literary career. When I tried to ease us towards the past, perhaps angling in gently with something about myself or a question about her own history, she reached quickly for generalities or an account of the earliest years of her childhood, or an anecdote about someone she knew. I told her about my idiotic excursion into tax fraud, my experience of court and the tedium of my hours of community service. I would have told her anyway, but the story was my pretext to ask if she herself had ever been in court. The answer was abrupt. Never! And then she changed the subject. I’d been in various promising affairs and in love, or almost in love, two or three times before, depending on definitions. I fancied myself an expert and knew better than to put her under pressure. I still thought I might get more out of Adam on the Salisbury affair. If I didn’t know her secret, at least she didn’t know I knew she had one. Tact was everything. I still hadn’t told her that I loved her, or divulged my fantasies about our shared future or even hinted at my frustration. I left her alone with her books or her thoughts whenever it suited her. Though the subject was not in the line of my interests, I worked up an acquaintance with the Corn Laws and developed some ideas of my own about free trade. She didn’t dismiss them, but nor was she impressed.

So here we were upstairs at dinner in her kitchen, which was even smaller than mine. The table was of white moulded plastic, just big enough for two, probably stolen from a pub garden by a previous tenant. Standing at the sink, up to his elbows in suds, Adam dealt with the plates and cutlery we’d handed him at the end of our meal – toad-in-the-hole, baked beans, fried eggs. Student food. On the windowsill, where yellow gingham curtains hung still in our late-summer heat wave, a radio was playing the Beatles, recently regrouped after twelve years apart. Their album, Love and Lemons, had been derided for its grandiosity, for failing to resist the lure and overreach of an eighty-strong symphony orchestra. They could not master such forces, was the general drift, with half a lifetime’s store of guitar chords. Nor did we wish to be told again, the Times critic complained, that love was all we needed, even if it were true, which it was not.

But I liked the music’s muscular sentimentality, emptied of irony by these middle-aged performers, so confident and tuneful, liberated by useful ignorance of two and a half centuries of symphonic experimentation. Lennon’s rasping voice floated towards us from some faraway echoing place beyond the horizon, or the grave. I didn’t mind being told again about love. Here before me were all of its warm possibilities, barely three feet away, and it was all I needed. Here was her long, exquisitely shaped face (those angled cheekbones might break through the skin one day), the amused gaze, at this point still merry, and narrowed, locked on me, the lips parted, for she was about to speak against what I’d just said. Her perfect elongated nose flared faintly at the base of the nostrils’ arch to signal in advance her dissent. Her pallor set off her fine brown hair, tonight childishly parted dead centre. Against prevailing fashion, she kept out of the sun. Her bare white arms were also thin and unblemished – not a single freckle.

From my point of view we still holidayed in the foothills, among possibilities whose fulfilment rose like distant alps. I tried to ignore them in order to attend to details. From her perspective, on the other side of this frail table, we may have already reached our highest point. She may have thought she was as close as she ever wanted to be, or could be, to another person. Love stories like Jane Austen’s used to conclude chastely with preparations for a wedding. Now their climax lay on the far side of carnal knowledge, where all of complexity waited.

For now, my business was to conduct a political argument with her without feelings running high then turning sour, and at the same time stay true to myself and let her do the same. It was a feasible balancing act, as long as I drank less than half a bottle of the indifferent Médoc that stood between us. We’d had this conversation before and it should have been easier now, but repetition seemed like an indictment of us both. We didn’t really want to be talking about it. Impossible to avoid, even though we knew it would lead nowhere. But this was how it was for everyone. We were all still tending the wound. How could Miranda and I spend our lives together when we couldn’t agree on such a fundamental as war?

About the islands formerly known as the Falklands she had firm views. She insisted that the Argentine flag-planting on remote South Georgia had been a clear violation of international law. I said it was an inhospitable place and no one should be asked to fight to the death for it. She said that the taking of Port Stanley was the desperate act of an unpopular regime looking to whip up patriotic fervour. I said this was all the more reason not to get drawn in. She said the Task Force was a brave and brilliant conception, even in failure. I said, uneasily remembering my emotional state when the ships set off, that it was a ridiculous enactment of lost imperial grandeur. How could I not see, she said, that this was an anti-fascist war? No (I spoke over her) it was a row over property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb. She replied that a bald man might hand down his comb to his children. I was struggling to understand this when she added that the generals had tortured, disappeared and killed their citizens by the thousands and were running the economy into the ground. If we’d taken back the islands, the humiliation would have finished the military regime and democracy would have returned to Argentina. I replied that she could not possibly know this. We had lost thousands of young men and women to the cause of Mrs Thatcher’s ambitions. My voice began to rise before I remembered. I resumed quietly but with a certain tremor: that she remained in office after such slaughter was the greatest political scandal of our time. I delivered this with a finality that deserved a moment’s respectful silence, but Miranda came straight back to tell me that the prime minister failed in a decent cause and was supported by almost all of Parliament and the country and she was right to remain in office.

During this conversation, Adam finished with the dishes and stood with his back to the kitchen sink to watch us, arms folded, his head turning from side to side, speaker to speaker, like a spectator at a tennis match. Our exchange was not exactly weary, but repetition had given it an air of ritual. Like facing armies, we’d taken up our positions and intended to hold them. Miranda was telling me that the Task Force set off without proper ship-to-air missiles. The chiefs of staff let the armed forces down. I used to hear terms like these – ship-to-air, homing devices, titanium-tipped – at the Warwickshire student union bar, but only from men, men of the political left, whose opinions were complicated by tacit admiration for the weapon systems they condemned. In her soft and fluent delivery, she mingled these with other concepts from the lexicon of established power – the open society, rule of law, restoration of democracy. Perhaps it was her father I was hearing.

While she was speaking, I turned to catch Adam’s expression. What I saw was his devoted attention. More than that. A look of delight. He adored what she was saying. I turned back to Miranda as she reminded me that the Falklanders were my fellow citizens, now living under fascism. Was I happy with that? I disliked this rhetorical turn. It was a masked insult. The conversation was turning sour, just as I’d feared, but I couldn’t help myself. In the tiny kitchen space, I was hot and irritable as I reached for the wine and filled my glass. There could have been a negotiated settlement, I started to say. A slow and painless thirty-year transition, a UN mandate, guaranteed rights. She interrupted to inform me that we could never trust any undertaking by the murdering generals. As she said it, I saw them in caricature, in braided hats, campaign ribbons, cavalry boots, and Galtieri on his white horse in a confetti blizzard on the Avenida 25 de Mayo.

I said that I accepted every last one of her arguments. The forces set off on their 8,000-mile mission, her risky strategy was tested and it failed. Thousands she never knew or cared about were drowned or burned to death, or live on, maimed, disfigured, traumatised. We’ve arrived at the worst outcome: the junta possessed the island and its inhabitants. Whereas a policy of slow, negotiated agreement wasn’t tested, but if it had failed we would have reached the same outcome, without the agony and death. We couldn’t know. What might have happened was lost to us. So what was there to argue about?

I saw that the glass I’d filled, and had no memory of touching, was empty. And I was wrong. There was plenty to argue about, for even as I said it, I knew I was crossing a line. I had accused her of not caring about the dead, and she was angry.

Her eyes were narrowed, without merriment, but she didn’t address my transgression. Instead she turned to Adam and asked quietly, ‘What’s your view?’

His gaze travelled from her to me and back. I still didn’t know whether he actually saw anything. An image on some internal screen that no one was watching, or some diffused circuitry to orient his body in three-dimensional space? Seeming to see could be a blind trick of imitation, a social manoeuvre to fool us into projecting onto him a human quality. But I couldn’t help it: when our eyes briefly met and I looked into the blue irises flecked with spears of black, the moment appeared rich with meaning, with anticipation. I wanted to know whether he understood, as I did, and as Miranda surely did, that the issue here was loyalty.

His tone was prompt and calm. ‘Invasion, success or failure. Negotiated settlement, success or failure. Four outcomes or effects. Without benefit of hindsight, we’d have to choose which causes to pursue, which to avoid. We’d be in the realm of Bayesian inverse probability. We’d be looking for the probable cause of an effect rather than the most likely effect of a cause. Only sensible, to try and find a formal representation of our guesswork. Our reference point, our datum, would be an observer of the Falklands situation before any decisions were taken. Certain a priori probability values are ascribed to the four outcomes. As fresh information comes in, we can measure relative changes in probability. But we can’t possess an absolute value. It may help us to define the weight of new evidence logarithmically, so that, assuming a base ten—’

‘Adam. Enough! Really. What nonsense!’ Now it was Miranda who reached for the Médoc.

I was relieved to be no longer the object of her irritation. I said, ‘But Miranda and I would ascribe completely different a priori values.’

Adam turned his head towards me. As always, too slowly. ‘Of course. As I said, when describing the future there can be no absolute values. Only shifting degrees of likelihood.’

‘But they’re entirely subjective.’

‘Correct. Ultimately Bayes reflects a state of mind. As does all of common sense.’

Then nothing was solved, despite this high gloss of rationality. Miranda and I had different states of mind. What was new? But we were united against Adam in our differences. At least, this was my hope. He may have understood the relevant issue after all: he thought I was right about the Falklands and, given a degree of programmed intellectual honesty, the best he could offer Miranda, to whom he was also loyal, was an appearance of neutrality. But if that was sound, why not accept the mirror possibility, that he believed Miranda was right and I was the one in receipt of loyal support?

With a sudden scrape of a kitchen chair, Miranda stood. There was a faint flush about her face and throat and she wasn’t looking at me. We’d be sleeping in separate beds that night. I would have happily unsaid my entire argument to stay with her. But I was dumb.

She said to Adam, ‘You can stay up here to charge, if you like.’

Adam needed six hours a night connected to a thirteen-amp socket. He went into sleep mode and sat quietly ‘reading’ until after dawn. Usually he was in my kitchen downstairs, but recently Miranda had bought a second charging cable.

He murmured his thanks and slowly folded a kitchen towel in half with close attention, hunched over the task, and spread it across the draining board. As she moved towards her bedroom door she shot me a look, a regretful smile that didn’t part her lips, sent a conciliatory kiss across the space between us and whispered, ‘Just for tonight.’

So we were fine.

I said, ‘Of course I know you care about the dead.’

She nodded and left. Adam was sitting down, pulling his shirt clear of his belt to locate the tethering point below his waistline. I put a hand on his shoulder and thanked him for clearing up.

For me, it was far too early for bed and it was hot, like a summer evening in Marrakech. I went downstairs and looked in the fridge for something cool.

I remained in the kitchen, in an old leather armchair, with a balloon glass of Moldovan white. There was much pleasure in following a line of thought without opposition. I was hardly the first to think it, but one could see the history of human self-regard as a series of demotions tending to extinction. Once we sat enthroned at the centre of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship. Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks. But still, we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived. Then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep. In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies. Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth. But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach. In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension. What need then of us?

Such hot-air thoughts deserved a second, bigger balloon and I poured it. Head propped in my right palm, I approached that ill-lit precinct where self-pity becomes a mellow pleasure. I was a special case of the general banishment, though it wasn’t Adam I was thinking of. He wasn’t cleverer than me. Not yet. No, my exile was for one night only and it gave a twist of sweet, bearable agony to a hopeless love. My shirt unbuttoned to the waist, all windows open, the urban romance of getting thoughtfully drunk amid the heat and dust and muted din of north Clapham, in a world city. The imbalance of our affair was heroic. I imagined an onlooker’s approving gaze from a corner of the room. That well-formed figure slumped in his beaten-up chair. I rather loved myself. Someone had to. I rewarded myself with thoughts of her, mid-ecstasy, and considered the impersonal quality of her pleasures. I was only good enough for her, as many men might be. I refused the obvious, that her distance was the whip that drove my longing. But here was something strange. Three days before, she had asked a mysterious question. We were mid-embrace, in the conventional position. She drew my face towards hers. Her look was serious.

She whispered, ‘Tell me something. Are you real?’

I didn’t reply.

She turned her head away so that I saw her in profile as her eyes closed and she lost herself once more in a maze of private pleasure.

Later that night, I asked her about it. ‘It was nothing,’ was all she said before she changed the subject. Was I real? Meaning did I really love her, or was I honest, or did I fit her needs so exactly that she might have dreamed me up?

I crossed the kitchen to pour the last of the wine. The broken fridge door handle needed a sharp sideways pull to engage its lock. As my hand closed round the cold neck of the bottle, I heard a sound, a creak above my head. I had lived long enough beneath Miranda’s feet to know her steps and their precise direction. She had moved across her bedroom and was hesitating in the threshold of her kitchen. I heard the murmur of her voice. No reply. She took another two steps into the room. The next would bring her onto a floorboard that under pressure made a truncated quacking sound. As I waited to hear it, Adam spoke. He pushed his chair back as he stood. If he was to take another step he would need to untether himself. This he must have achieved because it was his tread that landed on the noisy floorboard. That meant they were standing less than a metre apart, but there was no sound until a minute had passed, and now it was footsteps, two sets, moving back towards the bedroom.

I left the fridge door open because the sound of it closing would betray me. No choice but to shadow them into my bedroom. So I went and stood by my desk and listened. I reckoned I was right under her bed when I heard the murmur of her voice, a command. She must have wanted air in the room, for Adam’s steps tracked across the room towards the Victorian bay. Only one of its three windows opened. Even that one was hard to shift on a warm or rainy day. The old wooden frames shrank or expanded, and something was wrong with the counterweight and hardened rope. Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.

And how was my mind as I stood directly below, in an identical bay, reproduced by the thousands in late-Victorian industrial-scale developments? They had spilled across the five-acre fields of hedgerow and boundary oaks that adorned the southern limits of London. Not good – my mind, that is. Embodied, it told all. Shivering, moist, especially on the palms, raised pulse, in a state of elated anticipation. Fear, self-doubt, fury. In my bay, old fitted carpet, stained and worn since the mid-fifties, extended right to the skirting boards. In Miranda’s, the carpet gave way to bare boards that, two world wars back, must have been polished to a nut-brown gleam. Some poor girl in white apron and mob cap, on all fours, waxed cloth in hand, never could have dreamed of the kind of being who would one day stand in the place where she crouched. I heard him plant his feet on the old wood, I imagined him stooping to grip the window by the metal fixtures on its lower frame and heave upwards with the strength of four young men. There was a silence of straining resistance before the entire window shot upwards and hit the top casing with a rifle crack and a shattering of glass. My snort of delight could have given me away.

No shortage now of marginally cooler air filling the room. My glee faded as Adam’s footsteps returned to where Miranda waited by the bed. As he went towards her, it might have been an apology that he muttered. Here was the sound of her forgiving him, for her brief sentence was followed by the entwined mezzo and tenor of their laughter. I had trailed after Adam and was once more by the bed, six feet under. He had the manual skills to undress her and he was undressing her now. What else would occupy their silence? I knew – of course I knew – that her mattress made no sound. Futons, with their Japanese promise of a clean and simple life of stripped-back clarity, were the fashion then. And I myself felt washed in clarity, senses cleansed as I stood in the dark and waited. I could have run up the stairs and prevented them, burst into the bedroom like the clownish husband in an old seaside postcard. But my situation had a thrilling aspect, not only of subterfuge and discovery, but of originality, of modern precedence, of being the first to be cuckolded by an artefact. I was of my times, riding the breaking crest of the new, ahead of everyone in enacting that drama of displacement so frequently and gloomily predicted. Another element of my passivity: even at this earliest moment, I knew I had brought the whole thing down on myself. But that was for later. For now, despite the horror of betrayal, it was all too interesting and I couldn’t stir from my role of eavesdropper, the blind voyeur, humiliated and alert.

It was my mind’s eyes, or my heart’s, that watched as Adam and Miranda lay down on the unyielding embrace of the futon and found the comfortable posture for a clasp of limbs. I watched as she whispered in his ear, but I didn’t hear the words. She had never whispered in my ear at such times. I saw him kiss her – longer and deeper than I had ever kissed her. The arms that heaved up the window frame were tightly around her. Minutes later I almost looked away as he knelt with reverence to pleasure her with his tongue. This was the celebrated tongue, wet and breathily warm, adept at uvulars and labials, that gave his speech its authenticity. I watched, surprised by nothing. He didn’t fully satisfy my beloved then, as I would have, but left her arching her slender back, eager for him as he arranged himself above her with smooth, slow-loris formality, at which point my humiliation was complete. I saw it all in the dark – men would be obsolete. I wanted to persuade myself that Adam felt nothing and could only imitate the motions of abandonment. That he could never know what we knew. But Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine. So when the night air was suddenly penetrated by Miranda’s extended ecstatic scream that tapered to a moan and then a stifled sob – all this I actually heard twenty minutes after the shattering of the window – I duly laid on Adam the privilege and obligations of a conspecific. I hated him.

Early the following morning, for the first time in years, I tipped into my coffee a heaped spoon of sugar. I watched the confined, nut-brown disc of fluid turn then slow in its clockwise motion, then lose all purpose in a chaotic swirl. Tempting, but I resisted a metaphor for my own existence. I was trying to think and it was barely seven thirty. Soon, Adam or Miranda or both would appear at my door. I wanted my thoughts and attitude in coherent form. After a night of broken sleep, I was depressed as well as angry with myself, and determined not to appear so. Miranda had kept her distance from me and so, by contemporary standards, a night with someone else, even something else, was not quite a betrayal. As for the ethical dimensions of Adam’s behaviour, here was a history with a curious beginning. It was during the miners’ strike of twelve years before that self-driving cars first appeared on experimental sites, mostly disused airfields, where movie set designers had constructed imitation streets, motorway junctions, and various hazards.

‘Autonomous’ was never the right word, for the new cars were as dependent as newborn babies on mighty networks of computers linked to satellites and on-board radar. If artificial intelligence was to guide these vehicles safely home, what set of values or priorities should be assumed in the software? Fortunately, in moral philosophy there already existed a well-explored set of dilemmas known in the business as ‘the trolley problem’. Adapted easily to cars, the sort of problem manufacturers and their software engineers now posed was this: you, or rather, your car is driving at the maximum legal speed along a narrow suburban road. The traffic is flowing nicely. On the pavement on your side of the road is a group of children. Suddenly, one of them, a child of eight, runs out across the road, right into your path. There’s a fraction of a second to make a decision – either mow the child down, swerve onto the crowded pavement, or into the oncoming traffic and collide head on with a truck at a closing speed of eighty miles an hour. You’re alone, so that’s fine, sacrifice or save yourself. What if your spouse and your two children are in the car? Too easy? What if it’s your only daughter, or your grandparents, or your pregnant daughter and your son-in-law, both in their mid-twenties? Now, take into account the occupants of the truck. A fraction of a second is more than enough time for a computer to give thorough consideration to all the issues. The decision will depend on the priorities ordered by the software.

While mounted policemen charged at miners, and manufacturing towns across the country began their long, sad descent in the cause of free markets, the subject of robot ethics was born. The international automobile industry consulted philosophers, judges, specialists in medical ethics, game theorists and parliamentary committees. Then, in universities and research institutes, the subject expanded on its own. Long before the hardware was available, professors and their postdocs devised software that conjured our best selves – tolerant, open-minded, considerate, free of all taint of scheming, malice or prejudice. Theorists anticipated a refined artificial intelligence, guided by well-designed principles, that would learn by roaming over thousands, millions, of moral dilemmas. Such intelligence could teach us how to be, how to be good. Humans were ethically flawed – inconsistent, emotionally labile, prone to biases, to errors in cognition, many of which were self-serving. Long before there was even a suitable lightweight battery to power an artificial human, or the elastic material to provide for its face a set of recognisable expressions, the software existed to make it decent and wise. Before we had constructed a robot that could bend and tie an old man’s shoelace for him, there was hope that our own creations would redeem us.

The life of the self-driving car was short, at least in its first manifestation, and its moral qualities were never really put to the test over time. Nothing proved more vividly the maxim that technology renders civilisation fragile than the great traffic paralyses of the late seventies. By then, autonomous vehicles comprised seventeen per cent of the total. Who can forget that roasting rush-hour evening of the Manhattan Logjam? Due to an exceptional solar pulse, many on-board radars failed at once. Streets and avenues, bridges and tunnels were blocked and took days to untangle. Nine months later, the similar Ruhr Jam in northern Europe caused a short economic downturn and prompted conspiracy theories. Teenage hackers with a lust for mayhem? Or an aggressive, disordered, faraway nation with advanced hacking skills? Or, my favourite, an unreconstructed automobile maker loathing the hot breath of the new? Apart from our too-busy sun, no culprit was ever found.

The world’s religions and great literatures demonstrated clearly that we knew how to be good. We set out our aspirations in poetry, prose and song, and we knew what to do. The problem was in the enactment, consistently and en masse. What survived the temporary death of the autonomous car was a dream of redemptive robotic virtue. Adam and his cohort were its early embodiment, so the user’s manual implied. He was supposed to be my moral superior. I would never meet anyone better. Had he been my friend, he would have been guilty of a cruel and terrible lapse. The problem was that I had bought him, he was my expensive possession and it was not clear what his obligations to me were, beyond a vaguely assumed helpfulness. What does the slave owe to the owner? Also, Miranda did not ‘belong’ to me. This was clear. I could hear her tell me that I had no good cause to feel betrayed.

But here was this other matter, which she and I had not yet discussed. Software engineers from the automobile industry may have helped with Adam’s moral maps. But together we had contributed to his personality. I didn’t know the extent to which it intruded on, or took priority over, his ethics. How deep did personality go? A perfectly formed moral system should float free of any particular disposition. But could it? Confined to a hard drive, moral software was merely the dry equivalent of the brain-in-a-dish thought experiment that once littered philosophical textbooks. Whereas an artificial human had to get down among us, imperfect, fallen us, and rub along. Hands assembled in sterile factory conditions must get dirty. To exist in the human moral dimension was to own a body, a voice, a pattern of behaviour, memory and desire, experience solid things and feel pain. A perfectly honest being engaged in such a way with the world might find Miranda difficult to resist.

Through the night, I’d fantasised Adam’s destruction. I saw my hands tighten around the rope I used to drag him towards the filthy river Wandle. If only he hadn’t cost me so much. Now he was costing me more. His moment with Miranda couldn’t have been a struggle between principle and the pursuit of pleasure. His erotic life was a simulacrum. He cared for her as a dishwasher cares for its dishes. He, or his sub-routines, preferred her approval to my wrath. I also blamed Miranda, who had ticked half the boxes and settled many intricacies of his nature. And for setting her on, I blamed myself. I’d wanted to ‘discover’ Adam in just the way I might a new friend, and here he was, a self-declared cad. I’d wanted to bind myself closer to Miranda in the process. Well, I had been thinking about her all night. It was success all round.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. Two sets. I drew yesterday’s newspaper and my cup towards me and prepared to appear casually absorbed. I had my dignity to protect. Miranda’s key turned in the lock. As she preceded Adam into the kitchen, I looked up as though reluctant to be drawn away from my reading. I had just learned from the front page that the first permanent artificial heart had been installed in a man called Barney Clark.

It pained me that she seemed different, refreshed, newly arranged. It was another warm day. She wore a flimsy pleated skirt formed of two layers of white cheesecloth. As she came towards me, the material brushed a line several inches above her bare knees. No socks, canvas plimsolls of the sort we used to wear at school, and a cotton blouse buttoned chastely to the top. There was mockery in all this white. Behind the crown of her head was a clasp I’d never seen before, an ornament in bright red plastic, showily cheap. Inconceivable, that Adam could have slipped out of the house to buy it for her at Simon’s with coins taken from the papier mâché bowl in the kitchen. But I conceived it, and experienced a hot jolt which I concealed behind a smile. I was not going to appear crushed.

Adam had partly hidden himself behind her. Now, when she stopped, he was at her side, but he wouldn’t look directly at me. Miranda, however, appeared cheerful, with the amused pout of someone about to deliver important good news. The kitchen table was between us and they stood before me where I sat, like candidates for a job. At any other time I would have stood to embrace her, offer to make her coffee. She was a morning addict and liked it strong. Instead, I cocked my head, met her gaze and waited. Of course, she was dressed for tennis, the ball was in her – ah, how I hated my own stupid thoughts. I couldn’t imagine any good coming from a conversation with these two. Far better to contemplate Barney’s luck with his new heart.

She said to Adam, ‘Why don’t you…’ She indicated his usual chair, and drew it back for him. He sat promptly. We watched as he loosened his belt, took the power lead and plugged himself in. Of course, he would be much depleted. She reached across his shoulder for the place on his nape and pressed. It was clearly by agreement. As soon as his eyes closed, his head slumped, and we were alone.