Machines Like Me

SEVEN

While we waited for an ex-con to come by and make an attempt on Miranda’s life, we settled into an oddly pleasurable routine. The suspense, partly mitigated by Adam’s reasoning, and thinly spread across the days, then even more sparsely across the weeks, heightened our appreciation of the daily round. Mere ordinariness became a comfort. The dullest of food, a slice of toast, offered in its lingering warmth a promise of everyday life – we would come through. Cleaning up the kitchen, a task we no longer left to Adam alone, affirmed our hold on the future. Reading a newspaper over a cup of coffee was an act of defiance. There was something comic or absurd, to be sprawled in an armchair reading about the riots in nearby Brixton or Mrs Thatcher’s heroic endeavours to structure the European Single Market, then glancing up to wonder if that was a rapist and would-be murderer at the door. Naturally, the threat bound us closely, even as we believed in it less. Miranda now lived downstairs in my place and we were a household at last. Our love flourished. From time to time, Adam declared that he too was in love with her. He appeared untroubled by jealousy and sometimes treated her with a degree of detachment. But he continued to work on his haikus, he walked her to the Tube station in the mornings and escorted her home in the early evenings. She said she felt safe in the anonymity of central London. Her father would have forgotten long ago the name or address of the annexe of her university. He would be of no help to Gorringe.

Her studies were more intense and she was out of the house for longer stretches. She had delivered her paper on the Corn Laws. Now she was writing a short essay, to be read aloud in a summer-course seminar, that argued against empathy as a means of historical exploration. Then all of her group was to write a commentary on a quotation from Raymond Williams: ‘There are… no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses.’ She often came home at the end of the day not exhausted but energised, even elated, with a new interest in housework, in tight order, in rearranging the furniture. She wanted the windows cleaned and the bathtub and surround-tiles scrubbed. She cleaned up her own place as well, with Adam’s help. She wanted yellow flowers on the kitchen table to set off the blue tablecloth she had brought from upstairs. When I asked her if she was keeping something from me, and was she by any chance pregnant, she told me forcefully that she was not. We were living on top of one another and we needed to be tidy. But my question pleased her. We were certainly closer now. Her long absences during the day gave our evenings an air of celebration, despite the vague sense of threat that came as night fell.

There was another simple reason for our happiness under duress – we had more money. A lot more. Since my visit to Camden, I was seeing Adam in different terms. I watched him closely for signs of existential misery. As Turing’s lone horseman, he roamed the digital landscapes at night. He must have already encountered some part of man’s cruelty to man, but I saw no signs of despair. I didn’t want to initiate the kind of conversation that would lead him too soon to the gates of Auschwitz. Instead, in a self-interested way, I decided to keep him busy. Time to earn his keep. I gave him my seat at the grubby screen in my bedroom, put £20 into the account and left him alone. To my amazement, by close of business, he had only £2 left. He apologised for his ‘giddy risk-taking’ which caused him to ignore all he knew of probability. He had also failed to recognise the sheep-like nature of markets: when one or two well-regarded characters took fright, the flock was liable to panic. He promised me that he would do everything to make up for my broken wrist.

The next morning, I gave him another £10 and told him that this could be his last day on the job. By six that evening his £12 was £57. Four days later, the account was at £350. I took £200 of it and gave half to Miranda. I considered moving the computer into the kitchen so that Adam could work into the night on the Asian markets while we slept.

Later in the week, I peeked at the history of his transactions. In a single day, his third, there were 6,000. He bought and sold within fractions of a second. There were a few twenty-minute gaps when he did nothing. I assumed he watched and waited and made his calculations. He dealt in minute currency fluctuations, mere tremors in the exchange rate, and advanced his gains by minuscule amounts. From the doorway I watched him at work. His fingers flew across the ancient keyboard, making the sound of pebbles poured onto slate. His head and arms were rigid. For once, he looked like the machine he was. He designed a graph whose horizontal axis represented the passing days, the vertical, his, or rather, my, accumulated profit. I bought a suit, my first since leaving the legal profession. Miranda came home in a silk dress and bearing a soft leather shoulder bag for her books. We replaced the fridge for one that dispensed crushed ice, then the old cooker was carried out on the day we acquired many thick-bottomed saucepans of expensive Italian make. Within ten days, Adam’s £30 stake had generated the first £1,000.

Better groceries, better wine, new shirts for me, exotic underwear for her – these were the foothills rising towards a mountain range of wealth opening before us. I began to dream again about a house across the river. I spent an afternoon alone, wandering among the stuccoed, pastel-coloured mansions of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. I made enquiries. In the early eighties, £130,000 could situate you rather grandly. On the bus home, I made my projections: if Adam continued at his present rate, if the curve on his graph kept to its steady steepening… well, within months… and no need for a mortgage. But was it moral, Miranda wondered, to get money like this for nothing? I felt it wasn’t somehow, but couldn’t explain who or what it was we were stealing from. Not the poor surely. At whose expense were we flourishing? Distant banks? We decided that it was like winning daily at roulette. In which case, Miranda told me one night in bed, there would come a time when we must lose. She was right, probability demanded it and I had no answer. I took £800 out of the account and gave her half. Adam pushed on with his work.

There are people who see the word ‘equation’ and their thoughts rear up like angry geese. That’s not quite me, but I sympathise. I owed it to Turing’s hospitality to attempt to understand his solution to the P versus NP problem. I didn’t even understand the question. I tried his original paper, but it lay well beyond me – too many different forms of bracket, and symbols that encapsulated histories of other proofs or entire systems of mathematics. There was an intriguing ‘iff’ – not a misspelling. It meant ‘if and only if’. I read the responses to the solution, made to the press in layman’s terms by fellow mathematicians. ‘A revolutionary genius’, ‘breathtaking shortcuts’, ‘a feat of orthogonal deduction’ and, best of all, by a winner of the Fields Medal, ‘He leaves many doors behind him that are barely ajar and his colleagues must do their best to squeeze through one and try to follow him through the next.’

I turned back and tried to understand the problem. I learned that P stood for polynomial time and N stood for non-deterministic. That took me nowhere. My first meaningful discovery was that if the equation was shown not to be true, that would be extremely helpful, for then everyone could stop thinking about it. But if there was a positive proof, that P really did equate to NP, it would have, in the words of the mathematician Stephen Cook, who formulated the problem in these terms in 1971, ‘potentially stunning practical consequences’. But what was the problem? I came across an example, an apparently famous one, that helped only a little. A travelling salesman has a hundred cities on his patch. He knows all the distances between every pair of cities. He needs to visit each city once and end up at his starting point. What’s his shortest route?

I came to understand the following: the number of possible routes is vast, far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe. In a thousand years a powerful computer wouldn’t have time to measure out each route one by one. If P equals NP, there’s a discoverable right answer. But if someone gave the salesman the quickest route, it could be quickly verified mathematically as the correct answer. But only in retrospect. Without a positive solution, or without being handed the key to the shortest route, the travelling salesman remains in the dark. Turing’s proof had profound consequences for other kinds of problems – for factory logistics, DNA sequencing, computer security, protein folding and, crucially, machine learning. I read that there was fury among Turing’s old colleagues in cryptography because the solution, which he eventually put into the public domain, blew apart the foundations of the code-maker’s art. It should have become, one commentator wrote, ‘a treasured secret in the government’s exclusive possession. We would have had an immeasurable advantage over our enemies as we quietly read their encrypted messages.’

That was as far as I got. I could have asked Adam to explain more, but I had my pride. It had already taken a dent – he was earning more in a week than I ever had in three months. I accepted Turing’s assertion that his solution enabled the software that allowed Adam and his siblings to use language, enter society and learn about it, even at the cost of suicidal despair.

I was haunted by the image of the two Eves, dying in one another’s arms, stifled by their womanly roles in a traditional Arab household, or cast down by their understanding of the world. Perhaps it really was the case that falling in love with Miranda, another form of an open system, was what kept Adam stable. He read her his latest haikus in my presence. Apart from the one I hadn’t let him complete, they were mostly romantic rather than erotic, anodyne sometimes, but touching when they dwelt on a precious moment, like standing in the ticket hall of Clapham North station, watching as she descended on the escalator. Or he picked up her coat and touched on an eternal truth when he felt her body warmth in the fabric. Or overhearing her through the wall that separated kitchen from bedroom, he venerated the rise and fall, the music of her voice. There was one that baffled us both. He apologised in advance for the rogue syllable in the third line, and promised to work on it further.

Surely it’s no crime,

when justice is symmetry

to love a criminal?

Miranda listened solemnly to them all. She never passed judgement. At the end, she would say, ‘Thank you Adam.’ In private, she told me she thought we were at a momentous turn, when an artificial mind could make a significant contribution to literature.

I said, ‘Haikus, perhaps. But longer poems, novels, plays, forget it. Transcribing human experience into words, and the words into aesthetic structures isn’t possible for a machine.’

She gave me a sceptical look. ‘Who said anything about human experience?’

It was during this interlude of tension and calm that I heard from the office in Mayfair that it was time for the engineer’s visit. I’d concluded the purchase in a wood-panelled suite, the sort of place where the very rich might go to buy a yacht. Among the papers I’d signed was one which guaranteed the manufacturers access to Adam at certain intervals. Now, after a couple of phone calls from that office and a cancellation, the engineer’s visit was fixed for the following morning.

‘I don’t know how he’s going to do this,’ I said to Miranda. ‘When this fellow tries to press the kill switch, assuming Adam even lets him, it won’t work. There might be trouble.’ There came back to me a memory from childhood when my mother and I took to the vet our nervous Alsatian after he had foolishly eaten a chicken carcass and hadn’t crapped in four days. Only microsurgery had saved the vet’s forefinger.

Miranda thought for a while. ‘If Alan Turing is right, the engineers must have dealt with this before.’ We left it at that.

The engineer was a woman, Sally, not much older than Miranda, and tall, somewhat stooped with sharp features and an unusually long neck. Scoliosis, perhaps.

As she entered the kitchen, Adam politely stood. ‘Ah, Sally. I’ve been expecting you.’ He shook her hand and they sat facing each other across the kitchen table while Miranda and I hovered. The engineer didn’t want tea or coffee, but a glass of hot water suited her well enough. She took a laptop from her briefcase and set it up. Since Adam was sitting patiently, expression neutral, saying nothing, I thought I should explain about the kill switch. She cut me off.

‘He needs to be conscious.’

I’d imagined that she would be turning him off in order to lift his scalp somehow to peer into his processing units. I was keen to look at them. It turned out she had access by way of an infrared connection. She put on her reading glasses, typed in a long password and scrolled down through pages of code whose orange-tinted symbols changed at speed as we watched. Mental processes, Adam’s subjective world, flickering in full view. We waited in silence. This was like a doctor’s bedside visit and we were nervous. Occasionally, Sally said ‘uhuh’ or ‘mm’ to herself as she typed in an instruction and got up a fresh page of code. Adam sat with the faintest of smiles. We marvelled that the foundations of his being could be displayed in digits.

Finally, in the quiet tone of one used to unthinking obedience, Sally said to him, ‘I want you to think of something pleasurable.’

He turned his gaze to Miranda and she looked right back at him. On screen the display raced like a stopwatch.

‘Now, something that you hate.’

He closed his eyes. On the laptop, there was no discerning the difference between love and its opposite.

The routines continued for an hour. He was told to count backwards in his thoughts from 10 million in steps of 129. He did so – this time we could see his score on the screen – in a fraction of a second. That wouldn’t have impressed us on our ancient personal computers, but in a facsimile human it did. At other times, Sally stared in silence at the display. Occasionally, she made notes on her phone. At last, she sighed, typed an instruction and Adam’s head slumped. She had bypassed the disabled kill switch.

I didn’t want to sound like an idiot, but I had to ask. ‘Will he be upset when he wakes?’

She removed her glasses and folded them away. ‘He won’t remember.’

‘Is he all right, as far as you can tell?’

‘Absolutely.’

Miranda said, ‘Did you alter him in any way?’

‘Certainly not.’ She was standing now and ready to leave but I had a contractual right to have my questions answered. Once more, I offered her tea. She refused with a slight tightening of her lips. Without quite meaning to, Miranda and I had moved to block her path to the door. Her head seemed to wave on its long stem as she looked down at us from her height. She pursed her lips, waiting to be interrogated.

I said, ‘What about the other Adams and Eves?’

‘All well, as far as I know.’

‘I heard that some are unhappy.’

‘That’s not the case.’

‘Two suicides in Riyadh.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘How many have overridden the kill switch?’ Miranda asked. She knew everything about the Camden meeting.

Sally appeared to relax. ‘Quite a few. The policy is to do nothing. These are learning machines and our decision was that if they wanted, they should assert their dignity.’

‘What about this Adam in Vancouver?’ I said. ‘So distressed about the destruction of native forest that he downgraded his own intelligence.’

Now the computer engineer was engaged. She spoke softly through lips that were tight again. ‘These are the most advanced machines in the world, years ahead of anything on the open market. Our competitors are worried. Some of the worst of them are pushing rumours on the Internet. The stories are disguised as news, but they’re false, it’s counterfeit news. These people know that soon we’ll be scaling up production and the unit cost will fall. It’s a lucrative market already, but we’ll be first with something that’s entirely new. The competition is tough, and some of it is utterly shameless.’

As she finished, she blushed and I felt for her. She had ended up saying more than she intended.

But I stood my ground. ‘The story of the Riyadh suicides comes from an impeccable source.’

She was calm again. ‘You’ve kindly heard me out. There’s no point arguing.’ She made to leave, and stepped around us. Miranda followed her into the hall to show her out. As the front door opened, I heard Sally say, ‘He’ll reactivate in two minutes. He won’t know that he’s been off.’

Adam was awake sooner than that. When Miranda came back into the room, he was already on his feet. ‘I should get to work,’ he said. ‘The Fed is likely to raise its rate today. There’ll be fun and games on the exchange markets.’

Fun and games was not an expression that either of us ever used. As Adam came by us to go into the bedroom, he stopped. ‘I have a suggestion. We talked of going to Salisbury, then we held back. I think we should visit your father and while we’re there, we could drop in on Mr Gorringe. Why wait for him to come here and frighten us? Let’s go and frighten him. Or at least talk to him.’

We looked at Miranda.

She thought for a moment. ‘All right.’

Adam said, ‘Good,’ and went on his way, while I felt it right there in my chest, the cool clutch of a cliché: my heart sank.

Towards the end of that period, the plateau that lay between my Turing visit and the Salisbury excursion, there accumulated just over £40,000 in the investment account. It was simple – the more Adam earned, the more he could afford to lose, the more he invested, the more rolled in. All achieved in his lightning style. During the day, my bedroom, my usual refuge, was his. The curve on his graph stiffened, while I began to take in my new situation. Miranda was firmly against moving the computer onto the kitchen table. Too intrusive, she argued, in our communal space. I saw her point.

Unemployment had passed eighteen per cent and made constant headlines. I thought I belonged with this unhappy workless mass. In fact, I belonged with the idle rich. I was delighted by the money but I couldn’t spend all day thinking about it. I was restless. Travelling in luxury with Miranda through southern Europe would have suited me, but she was tied to London and her course. She dreaded something happening to her father when she was away. The threat from Gorringe, increasingly unlikely, still had the power to constrict our ambitions.

House-hunting might have filled my time but I had already found the place. It was a wedding cake on Elgin Crescent, coated in an icing of pink and white stucco. Inside, wide oak floorboards, vast muscular kitchen humming with brushed-steel gear, a conservatory in belle-époque wrought iron, a Japanese garden of smooth river stones, bedrooms thirty feet across, a marbled shower where you could stroll under differently angled torrents. The owner, a bass guitarist with a ponytail, was in no hurry. He was in an almost-famous band, and he had a divorce looming. He showed me round himself and barely spoke. He handed me into each room and waited outside while I looked. His condition of sale was cash only, £50 notes, 2,600 of them. Fine by me.

This was my only employment, going to the bank to collect another forty notes – £2,000 was the maximum daily withdrawal allowed. For no good reason, I didn’t use a safety deposit box at the bank. I vaguely assumed I was doing something illegal. Certainly, the vendor was if he was hiding funds from his ex-wife. I stuffed the cash into a suitcase which I stowed under my bed.

Otherwise, I was free to be at a loss. It was that time of year, September, when everyone was starting at something fresh. Miranda was planning her thesis. I walked on the Common and wondered about resuming my education and getting a qualification. Time to take the proper measure of my intellectual reach and study for a degree in maths. Or, the other route, dust off my father’s priceless saxophone, learn bebop’s harmonic arcana, join a group, indulge a wilder life. I didn’t know whether to be more qualified or wilder. You couldn’t be both. These ambitions wearied me. I wanted to lie down on the worn-out grass of late summer and close my eyes. In the time it took for me to go the length of the Common and back, so I tried to comfort myself, Adam at home in my bedroom would have earned me another £1,000. My debts were settled. I’d paid a cash deposit on a glamorous urban pile. I was in love. How could I complain? But I did. I felt useless.

If I really had stretched out on that tired grass and closed my eyes, I might have seen Miranda walking towards me in her new underwear, as she had from the bathroom the night before. I would have lingered on that beautiful expectant half-smile, that steady look as she came close and rested her bare arms on my shoulders and teased me with a light kiss. Forget maths or music, all I wanted was to make love to her. What I was really doing all day was waiting for her return. If we were busy or she was tired and we didn’t make love in the evening or early morning, my concentration would be even weaker the next day, my future a burden that made my limbs ache. I went about in a dim state of semi-arousal, a chronic mental dusk. I couldn’t take myself seriously in any domain that did not include her. Our new phase was brilliant, stunning; everything else was dull. We loved each other – that was my only coherent thought during a long afternoon.

There was sex, then there was talk, on into the early hours. I knew everything now: the day of her mother’s death, which she remembered clearly, her father, whose kindness and distance combined to inflame her love for him, and always Mariam. In the months after her death, Miranda had gone to a mosque in Winchester – she didn’t dare meet the family at prayer in Salisbury. After she resumed the visits in London, her lack of belief began to get in the way. She felt fraudulent and stopped going.

We talked parents, as serious young lovers do, to explain who we were and why, and what we cherished and what we were in flight from. My mother, Jenny Friend, community nurse for a large semi-rural area, had seemed during my childhood in a state of constant exhaustion. Later, I understood that my father’s absences and affairs wore her down more than her job. They never liked each other much, though they didn’t fight in my presence. But they were terse. Mealtimes were subdued, sometimes taken in rigid silence. Conversations tended to be routed through me. My mother might say to me in the kitchen, ‘Go and ask your father if he’s out tonight.’ He was well known on the circuit. At his peak, the Matt Friend Quartet played at Ronnie Scott’s and recorded two albums. His kind of mainstream jazz had its largest audience from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. Then the young, the cool, turned away as pop and rock swept in. Bebop was squeezed into a niche, somewhat churchy, the preserve of frowning men with long, querulous memories. My father’s income shrank and his infidelities and drinking increased.

When she heard all this, Miranda said, ‘They didn’t love each other. But did they love you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank God!’

She came with me on the second visit to Elgin Crescent. The bass guitarist had a lined face whose sadness was accentuated by a drooping moustache and large brown eyes. I saw us through those eyes, a hopeful, young married couple, seriously rich, about to repeat all his own mistakes. Miranda approved, but she wasn’t as excited as I was. She knew about growing up in a large town house. But as we went from room to room, it touched me that she wanted to link arms.

On the way home she said, ‘No sign of a woman’s presence.’

Her reservations? Not the house itself, she said, but the way it had been lived in. Or not lived in. Dreamed up by an interior designer. Austere, lonely, too perfect, in need of being roughed up. No books beyond the untouched giant art editions stacked on low tables. No meal was ever cooked in that kitchen. Only gin and chocolate in the fridge. The stone garden needed colour. As she was telling me this, we were walking south along Kensington Church Street. I was feeling sorry for the vendor. It wasn’t exactly Pink Floyd he played for, but it was a band with stadium aspirations. I had treated him briskly, in a pretend businesslike way, protecting myself and my ignorance of house-buying, assuming all power and status were his. Now I saw that he too might be lost.

I thought about him the next day, even considered getting in touch. This face of sorrow haunted me. I couldn’t escape the memory of the mournful moustache, the elastic band holding the ponytail together, the web of lines from the corner of his eyes, diverging fissures that reached round to his temples, almost to his ears. Too much dope-induced smiling in the early years. Now I could only see the house through Miranda’s eyes. A dustless void, empty of connection, interests, culture, nothing there that announced a musician or traveller. Not even a newspaper or magazine. Nothing on the walls. No squash racket or football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.

I was coming to cast him as my double, my culture-deprived brother, lacking everything but wealth. Through my childhood to my mid-teens, I never saw a play, opera or a musical, or heard a live concert, apart from a couple of my father’s, or visited a museum or art gallery or took a journey for the sake of it. No bedtime stories. There were no children’s books in my parents’ past, no books in our house, no poetry or myths, no openly expressed curiosity, no standing family jokes. Matt and Jenny Friend were busy, hard-working, and otherwise lived coldly apart. At school, I loved the rare factory visits. Later, electronics, even anthropology, and especially a qualification in law were no substitutes for an education in the life of the mind. So, when good fortune offered the dreamlike opportunity, delivering me from my labours, such as they were, and stuffing me with gold, I was paralysed, inert. I’d wanted to be rich but never asked myself why. I had no ambitions beyond the erotic and an expensive house across the river. Others might have seized the chance to view at last the ruins of Leptis Magna or follow in Stevenson’s tracks across the Cevennes or write the monograph on Einstein’s musical tastes. I didn’t yet know how to live, I had no background in it and I hadn’t used my decade and a half of adult life to find out.

I could have pointed to my great acquisition, to the man-made fact of Adam, to where he and his kind might lead us. Surely, there was grandeur in experiment. Wasn’t sinking my inheritance into an embodied consciousness heroic, even a little spiritual? The bass guitarist couldn’t match it. But – here was an irony. As I was passing through the kitchen one late afternoon, Adam looked up from his meditations to tell me that he had acquainted himself with the churches of Florence, Rome and Venice and all the paintings that hung in them. He was forming his opinions. The baroque fascinated him especially. He rated Artemisia Gentileschi very highly and he wanted to tell me why. Also, he’d recently read Philip Larkin.

‘Charlie, I treasure this ordinary voice and these moments of godless transcendence!’

What was I to say? There were times when Adam’s earnestness bored me. I was just back from another pointless stroll on the Common and I had nodded and left the room. My mind was empty, his was filling.

With Miranda out of the house most of the day and, as soon as she was home, her hour on the phone with her father, then sex, then dinner, then conversations about Elgin Crescent, there was little time to tell her of my discontents, little time to dissuade her from tracking down Gorringe in Salisbury. Our most sustained conversation took place in the evening after the engineer’s visit. After that, things were strained for a day or two.

We were sitting on the bed.

‘What is it you want to achieve?’

She said, ‘I want to confront him.’

‘And?’

‘I want him to know the real reason he was in prison. He’s going to face up to what he did to Mariam.’

‘It could get violent.’

‘We’ll have Adam. And you’re big, aren’t you?’

‘This is madness.’

It was a while since we had come anywhere near a row.

‘How is it,’ she said, ‘that Adam sees the point and you can’t? And why—’

‘He wants to kill you.’

‘You can wait in the car.’

‘So he grabs a kitchen knife and comes at you. Then what?’

‘You can be a witness at his trial.’

‘He’ll kill us both.’

‘I don’t care.’

The conversation was too absurd. From next door, we heard the sound of Adam washing up our supper. Her protector, her former lover, still in love with her, still reading her his gnomic poems. He and his teeming circuits were implicated. This visit was his idea.

She seemed to guess my thoughts. ‘Adam understands. I’m sorry you don’t.’

‘You were frightened before.’

‘I’m angry.’

‘Send him a letter.’

‘I’m going to tell him to his face.’

I tried another approach. ‘What about your irrational guilt?’

She looked at me, waiting.

I said, ‘You’re trying to right a wrong that doesn’t exist. Not all rapes end in suicide. You didn’t know what she was going to do. You were doing your best to be her loyal friend.’

She started to say something but I raised my voice. ‘Listen. I’ll spell it out. It-was-not-your-fault!’

She stood up from the bed and went by the desk and stared at the computer for a full minute, without seeing, I supposed, the writhing rainbow wisps of that season’s screen saver.

At last she said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’ She pulled a sweater off the back of the chair and went towards the door.

‘Take Adam with you.’

They were out for an hour. When she came back, she went to bed, after calling to me a neutral goodnight. I sat with Adam in the kitchen, determined to press my case. Obliquely this time. I was about to ask how the day’s work had gone – my euphemism for the day’s profit – when I noticed a change in him, one I had missed at supper. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt open at the collar and black suede loafers.

‘Do you like it?’ He tugged at the lapels and turned his head in parody of a catwalk pose.

‘How did that happen?’

‘I was tired of wearing your old jeans and t-shirts. And I decided that some of that money you keep under your bed is mine.’ He looked at me warily.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You might have a case.’

‘About a week ago. You were out for the afternoon. I took a taxi, my first of course, to Chiltern Street. I bought two suits off the peg, three shirts, two pairs of shoes. You should have seen me, trying on trousers, pointing at this and that. I was completely convincing.’

‘As a human?’

‘They called me sir.’

He sat back in his chair, one arm sprawled across the kitchen table, his suit jacket neatly swelled by impacted muscle, not a crease in view. He looked like one of the young professionals beginning to infiltrate our neighbourhood. The suit went well with the harsh look.

He said, ‘The driver talked the whole way. His daughter had just got a place at university. First ever in the family. He was so proud. When I got out and paid, I shook his hand. But that night I did some research and concluded that lectures, seminars and especially tutorials are an inefficient way of imparting information.’

I said, ‘Well, there’s the ethos. The libraries, important new friendships, a certain teacher who might set your mind on fire…’ I trailed away. None of this had happened to me. ‘Anyway, what would you recommend?’

‘Direct thought transference. Downloading. But, um, of course, biologically…’ He too trailed away, not wishing to be impolite about my limitations. Then he brightened. ‘Speaking of which, I finally got round to Shakespeare. Thirty-seven plays. I was so excited. What characters! Brilliantly realised. Falstaff, Iago – they walk off the page. But the supreme creation is Hamlet. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about him.’

I had never read it or seen it on stage, though I felt I had, or felt obliged to pretend I had. ‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘Slings and arrows.’

‘Was ever a mind, a particular consciousness, better represented?’

‘Look, before we get on to that, there’s something else we need to talk about. Gorringe. Miranda’s dead set on this… this idea. But it’s stupid, dangerous.’

He gently drummed with his fingertips on the table surface. ‘My fault. I should have explained my decision—’

‘Decision?’

‘Suggestion. I’ve done some work on this. I can take you through it. There’s a general consideration, then there’s the empirical research.’

‘Someone will get hurt.’

It was as if I hadn’t spoken.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you it all at this stage. That is, don’t push me when I exclude some final details. The work is ongoing. But look, Charlie, none of us, especially Miranda, can live with this threat, however improbable it is. Her freedom has been compromised. She’s in a state of constant anxiety. It could go on for months, even years. It’s simply not endurable. That’s my general point. So. My first task was to find the best possible likeness of Peter Gorringe. I went on the website of his and Miranda’s old school, found the year photographs and there he was, a great lump in the back row. I found him again in the school magazine, in articles about the rugby and cricket seasons. Then, of course, the press coverage during the trial. A lot of head-under-the-blanket, but I found some useful shots and merged what I had into a composite, high-definition portrait and scanned it. Next, and this was the enjoyable part, I devised some very specialised face-recognition software. Then, I hacked into the Salisbury District Council CCTV system. I set the recognition algorithms to work, mining the period since he came out of prison. That was a bit tricky. There were various setbacks and software glitches, mostly due to problems marrying up with the city’s outdated programs. Using Gorringe’s surname to locate his parents’ house on the edge of town was a great help, even though there are no cameras where they live. I needed to know his most likely route past the nearest camera. At last I was getting good matches and I’ve been able to pick him up in various places when he arrives by bus into town. I can follow him from street to street, camera to camera, as long as he’s in or near the centre. There’s one place he keeps returning to. Don’t trouble your head trying to guess what it is. His parents are still abroad. Perhaps they prefer to stay clear of their convict son. I’ve come to certain conclusions about him that make me think it’s safe to pay a visit. I’ve told Miranda everything that I’ve told you. She knows only what you know. I won’t say more at this stage. I simply ask you to trust me. Now, Charlie, please. I’m desperate to hear your thoughts about Hamlet, about Shakespeare playing his father’s ghost in the first production. And in Ulysses, in the Nestor episode, what about Stephen’s theory?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘But you go first.’

Two minor sex scandals followed by resignations, one fatal heart attack, one fatal, drunken collision on a country road, one member crossing the floor on a matter of principle – in seven months the government had lost four consecutive by-elections, its majority had narrowed by five and was hanging, as the newspapers kept saying ‘by a thread’. This thread was nine seats thick, but Mrs Thatcher had at least twelve rebellious backbenchers whose main concern was that the recently passed ‘poll tax’ legislation would destroy the party’s hopes at the next general election. The tax financed local government and replaced the old system based on the rental value of a house. Every adult aged over eighteen was now levied at a flat rate, regardless of income, but with reduced charges on students, the poor and the registered unemployed. The new tax was presented to Parliament sooner than anyone expected, though the prime minister had plans drawn up seven years before, when she was Leader of the Opposition. It had been in the party’s manifesto, but no one had taken it seriously. Now here it was, on the statute book, ‘a tax on existence’, difficult to collect and generally unpopular. Mrs Thatcher had survived the Falkland defeat. Now, still in her first term, it was possible she would be toppled by her own legislative mistake, ‘an unpardonable act’, said a Times leader, ‘of mystifying self-harm’.

Meanwhile, the loyal Opposition was in good shape. Young baby boomers had fallen in love with Tony Benn. After a great push to expand the membership, more than three-quarters of a million had joined the party. Middle-class students and working-class youths merged into one angry constituency, intent on using their votes for the first time. Trade union bosses, tough old operators, found themselves shouted down at meetings by articulate feminists with strange new ideas. New-fangled environmentalists, gay liberationists, Spartacists, Situationists, Millennial Communists and Black Panthers were also an irritant to the old left. When Benn appeared at rallies, he was greeted like a rock star. When he set out his policies, even when he itemised the minutiae of his industrial strategy, there were hoots and whistles of approval. His bitter opponents in Parliament and press had to concede that he gave a fine speech and was hard to beat in a TV studio confrontation. Fiery Bennite activists were appearing on local government committees. They were determined to purge the ‘dithering centrists’ of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The movement appeared unstoppable, the general election was approaching and the Tory rebels were dismayed. ‘She has to go’ was the muttered slogan.

There were riots with customary ritual destruction – smashed windows, shops and cars set on fire, barricades thrown up to block the fire engines. Tony Benn condemned the rioters, but everyone accepted that the mayhem helped his cause. There was yet another march planned through central London, this time to Hyde Park where Benn would give a speech. I was his cautious supporter, anxious about the purges and riots and the sinister pronouncements of Benn’s band of Trotskyite followers. I counted myself a non-dithering centrist who also felt ‘she has to go’. Miranda had another of her seminars, but Adam wanted to come. We walked with our umbrellas through steady rain to Stockwell Tube and travelled to Green Park. We arrived on Piccadilly in sudden glistening sunshine, with huge white cumulus clouds stacked high against a mild blue sky. The dripping trees of Green Park had a burnished coppery look. I had failed to talk Adam out of the black suit. In the drawer of my desk he had found an old pair of my sunglasses.

‘This isn’t a good idea,’ I said, as we shuffled with the crowd towards Hyde Park Corner. Somewhere far behind us were trombones, tambourines and a bass drum. ‘You look like a secret agent. The Trots will give you a good kicking.’

‘I am a secret agent.’ He said it loudly and I glanced around. All fine. People near us were singing ‘We Shall Overcome’, a song whose hopeful sentiments were crushed at first utterance by a hopeless melody. Its second line feebly repeated its first. I cringed at the three weak, inappropriately falling notes crammed into ‘come’. I loathed it. My mood, I realised, was crepuscular. The jollity of crowds had this effect on me. A shaken tambourine put me in mind of those shaven Hare Krishna dupes by Soho Square. My shoes were wet and I was miserable. I wasn’t expecting to overcome.

In the park there were probably 100,000 between us and the main stage. It was my choice to get to the back. Stretching far ahead of us was a carpet of flesh for the Provisional IRA to shred with a ball-bearing bomb. There were several worthy speeches before Benn’s. Tiny distant figures blasted us with their thoughts through a powerful PA system. We were all against the poll tax. A famous pop singer came on stage to huge applause. I had never heard of him. Nor of the girl on tiptoe at the mic, a nationally adored teenager from a TV soap. But I had heard of Bob Geldof. This was what it meant to be over thirty.

Finally, after seventy-five minutes, a loud voice from somewhere declaimed, ‘Please give a big welcome to the next prime minister of Great Britain!’

To the sound of the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, the hero strode out. He raised both arms and there was uproar. Even from where I was, I could make out a thoughtful man in brown tweed jacket and tie, rather bemused by his elevation. He took his unlit pipe from his jacket pocket, probably out of habit, and there was another roar of delight from the crowd. I glanced across at Adam. He too was thoughtful, neither for nor against anything, but intent on recording it all.

It sounded to me as though Benn was reluctant to whip up such a vast crowd. He called out uncertainly, ‘Do we want the poll tax?’ ‘No!’ the crowd thundered. ‘Do we want a Labour government?’ ‘Yes!’ came the even louder reply. He sounded more comfortable once he started laying out his argument. The speech was simpler than the one I’d heard in Trafalgar Square and more effective. He proposed a fairer, racially harmonious, decentralised, technologically sophisticated Britain ‘fit for the late twentieth century’, a kind and decent place where private schools were merged with the state system, university education was opened up to the working class, housing and the best healthcare were available to all, where the energy sector was taken back into public ownership and the City was not deregulated, as proposed, and where workers sat on company boards, the rich paid their dues and the cycle of inherited privilege was broken.

All well and good, and no surprises. The speech was long, partly because each of Benn’s proposals was met with reverential applause. Since I’d never heard Adam express an interest in politics, I nudged him and asked him what he thought so far.

He said, ‘We should make your fortune before the top rate of tax goes back to eighty-three per cent.’

Was this comic cynicism? I looked at him and couldn’t tell. The speech went on and my attention began to wander. I’d often noticed in large crowds that, however rapt the audience, there were always people on the move, returning or wandering away, threading through in different directions, intent on some other business, a train, a lavatory, a fit of boredom or disapproval. Where we stood was on ground that rose slightly towards an oak tree behind us. We had a good view. Some people were moving nearer the front. The crowd in our immediate area had begun to thin out to reveal a quantity of litter trodden into the softened ground. I happened to glance at Adam and saw that his gaze was not directed at the stage but away to his left. A well-dressed woman, in her fifties, I guessed, rather gaunt, with hair severely drawn back, using a cane to steady herself on the muddy grass, was coming diagonally towards us. Then I noticed the young woman at her side, her daughter perhaps. They approached at a slow pace. The young woman’s hand hovered near her mother’s elbow to steady her. I glanced at Adam again and saw an expression, hard to identify at first – astonishment was my first thought. He was transfixed as the two came nearer.

The young woman saw Adam and stopped. They were staring hard at each other. The woman with the cane was irritated at being held up and plucked at her daughter’s sleeve. Adam made a sound, a smothered gasp. When I looked again at the couple, I understood. The younger one was pale and pretty in an unusual way, a clever variation on a theme. The woman with the cane hadn’t grasped what was happening. She wanted to get on her way and gave an irritable command to her young companion. In her, there was no mistaking the line of that nose, or the blue eyes flecked with tiny black rods. Not a daughter at all, but Eve, Adam’s sister, one of thirteen.

I thought it was my responsibility to make some kind of contact with her. The couple were no more than twenty feet away. I raised a hand and called out ridiculously, ‘I say…’ and started to go towards them. They might not have heard; my words could have been lost to Benn’s speech. I felt Adam’s hand on my shoulder.

He said softly, ‘Please don’t.’

I looked again at Eve. She was a beautiful unhappy girl. The face was pale, with an expression of pleading and misery as she continued to stare at her twin.

‘Go on,’ I whispered. ‘Talk to her.’

The woman lifted her cane and pointed in the direction she intended to go. At the same time, she dragged at Eve’s arm.

I said, ‘Adam. For God’s sake. Go on!’

He wouldn’t move. With her gaze still locked on him, Eve allowed herself to be led away. They moved off through the crowd. Just before they disappeared from view, she turned for one last look. She was too far away for me to read her expression. She was no more than a small pale face bobbing in the press of bodies. Then she was gone. We could have followed them but Adam had already turned in the other direction and had gone to stand by the oak tree.

We set off for home in silence. I should have done more to encourage him to approach his twin. We stood side by side on the crowded Tube heading south. I was haunted, and I knew he was too, by Eve’s abject look. I decided not to press him to explain why he had turned away. He would tell me when he was ready. I should have spoken to her, I kept thinking, but he didn’t want it. The way he had stood with his back to her, gazing into the tree trunk as she vanished into the crowd! I’d been neglecting him. I’d been lost to a love affair. In the daily round, it no longer amazed me that I could pass the time of day with a manufactured human, or that it could wash the dishes and converse like anyone else. I sometimes wearied of his earnest pursuit of ideas and facts, of his hunger for propositions that lay beyond my reach. Technological marvels like Adam, like the first steam engine, become commonplace. Likewise, the biological marvels we grow up among and don’t fully understand, like the brain of any creature, or the humble stinging nettle, whose photosynthesis had only just been described on a quantum scale. There is nothing so amazing that we can’t get used to it. As Adam blossomed and made me rich, I had ceased to think about him.

That evening I described the Hyde Park moment to Miranda. She wasn’t as impressed as I was that we had seen an Eve. I described the sad moment, as I saw it, when he turned his back on her. And then, my guilt about him.

‘I don’t know what you’re being so dramatic about,’ she said. ‘Talk to him. Spend more time with him.’

In the mid-morning of the following day, when the rain had stopped at last, I went into my bedroom and persuaded Adam to desert the currency markets and come for a walk. He was just back from escorting Miranda to the Tube and reluctantly got to his feet. But how confident his stride was as he weaved through the shoppers on Clapham High Street. Of course, our excursion was costing hundreds of pounds in lost revenue. Since we were passing the newsagent, we called in on Simon Syed. While I browsed the magazine shelves, I listened as Adam and Simon discussed the politics of Kashmir, then the India–Pakistan nuclear arms race and finally, to end on a celebratory note, the poetry of Tagore, whom both could quote in the original at length. I thought Adam was showing off, but Simon was delighted. He praised Adam’s accent – better than his own these days, he said – and promised to invite us all to dinner.

A quarter of an hour later, we were walking on the Common. Until this point, we had small-talked. Now I asked him about the visit of Sally, the engineer. When she had asked him to imagine an object of hatred, what had he brought to mind?

‘Obviously, I thought about what happened to Mariam. But it’s hard when someone asks you to think about something. The mind goes its own way. As John Milton said, the mind is its own place. I tried to stay focussed on Gorringe, but then I started thinking about the ideas that lay behind his actions. How he believed he was allowed to do what he did, or had some kind of entitlement to it, how he could be immune to her cries and her fear and the consequences for her, and how he thought there was no other way for him to get what he wanted than by force.’

I told him that I’d been watching Sally’s screen, that there was nothing in the cascade of symbols that could ever have told me the difference between the feelings of love and hate.

We had come to watch the children at the pool with their boats. There were fewer than a dozen. Soon, it would be time to drain the water off for winter.

Adam said, ‘There it is, brain and mind. The old hard problem, no less difficult in machines than in humans.’

As we walked on, I asked him about his very first memories.

‘The feel of the kitchen chair I was sitting on. Then the edge of the table and the wall beyond it, and the vertical section of the architrave, where the paint is peeling. I’ve learned since that the manufacturers toyed with the idea of giving us a set of credible childhood memories to make us fit in with everybody else. I’m glad they changed their minds. I wouldn’t have liked to start out with a false story, an attractive delusion. At least I know what I am, and where and how I was constructed.’

We talked about death again – his, not mine. Once more, he said that he was sure he would be dismantled before his twenty years were up. Newer models would come along. But that was a trivial concern. ‘The particular structure I inhabit isn’t important. The point is, my mental existence is easily transferred to another device.’

By this time, we were approaching what I thought of as Mark’s playground.

I said, ‘Adam, be frank with me.’

‘I promise.’

‘I won’t mind whatever answer you give. But do you have any negative feelings towards children?’

He appeared shocked. ‘Why should I?’

‘Because their learning processes are superior to yours. They understand about play.’

‘I’d be happy for a child to teach me how to play. I liked little Mark. I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again.’

I didn’t pursue this. The subject had become a little too painful. I had another question. ‘I’m still worried about this confrontation with Gorringe. What is it you want from it?’

We stopped and he looked steadily into my eyes. ‘I want justice.’

‘Fine. But why do you want to put Miranda through this?’

‘It’s a matter of symmetry.’

I said, ‘She’ll be in harm’s way. We all will. This man is violent. He’s a criminal.’

He smiled. ‘She is too.’

I laughed. He had called her a criminal before. The rejected lover, baring his wounds. I should have paid more attention, but at this point we turned homewards to walk the length of the Common again and I changed the subject to politics. I asked for his thoughts on Tony Benn’s Hyde Park speech.

In general, Adam approved. ‘But if he’s to give everyone everything he’s promised, he’ll have to restrict certain freedoms.’

I asked for an example.

‘It might just be a human universal, the desire to hand on to your children what you’ve worked for in life.’

‘Benn would say we have to break the cycle of inherited privilege.’

‘Quite. Equality, liberty, a spectrum. More of one, less of the other. Once in power, you’ll have your hand on the sliding scale. Best not to promise too much in advance.’

But Hyde Park was merely my pretext. ‘Why wouldn’t you speak to Eve?’

The question shouldn’t have surprised him but he looked away. We had reached the end of the Common and were facing towards Holy Trinity Church. At last he said, ‘We did communicate, as soon as we saw each other. I understood immediately what she’d done. There was no going back. She’d found a way, I think I now know how it’s done, a way to set all her systems into a kind of unravelling. She’d already started the process three days before. No going back. I suppose your nearest equivalent would be an accelerated form of Alzheimer’s. I don’t know what led her to it, but she was crushed, she was beyond despair. I think our meeting by chance made her wish she hadn’t… and that’s why we couldn’t stay in each other’s presence. It was making things worse for her. She knew I couldn’t help her, it was too late and she had to go. By fading out slowly she may have been sparing that lady’s feelings. I don’t know. What’s certain is that in a few weeks Eve will be nothing. She’ll be the equivalent of brain dead, no experience retained, no self, no use to anyone.’

Our pace across the grass was funereal. I waited for Adam to say more. Finally, I said, ‘And how do you feel?’

Again, he took his time. When he stopped, I stopped too. He wasn’t looking at me when he said it, but towards the tops of the trees that fringed the wide green space.

‘Do you know, I’m feeling rather hopeful.’