Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

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

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

  ‘Good.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What was that?’

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

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

  ‘Yes.’

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

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

  ‘Oh that …’

  ‘Come on.’

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

  ‘Answer the question.’

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

  ‘I was thinking only of your best interests.’

  ‘You just said you were sorry.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I see. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘We all make mistakes.’

  ‘We certainly do.’

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

  ‘Only this one.’

  ‘Then it’s important.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And important not to repeat it.’

  ‘Of course.’

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

  ‘I agree.’

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

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

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘Thank you.’

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

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

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

  ‘Go on.’

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

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

  ‘October the … Salisbury. But look—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 sin
ce 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.