Machines Like Me

by Ian Mcewan

  ‘Yesterday was glorious.’

  I was giddy. It was as if she had proposed that we make love in public, now, across the table.

  ‘We could go home right now.’

  She did a comic little double-take. ‘You haven’t opened your present.’

  She pushed it across with a forefinger. While I unwrapped it, our boy waiter refilled the glasses. I found a small plain cardboard box. Inside was a z-shaped piece of strip metal with padding on the parallel surfaces. A wrist exerciser.

  ‘For when your plaster comes off.’

  I stood and went around the table to kiss her. Someone nearby said, ‘Oi-oi!’ Another person made the sound of a barking dog. I wasn’t bothered. Back in my seat I said, ‘Adam says he’s disabled his kill switch.’

  She leaned forward, suddenly serious. ‘You’ve got to get him back to the shop.’

  ‘But he loves you. He told me.’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  I said, ‘If he needs reprogramming, you’re the one he’ll listen to.’

  Her tone was plaintive. ‘How can he talk about love? This is madness.’

  Our waiter was hovering and heard everything we said next, even though I murmured quickly. ‘You helped choose the kind of guy he is – the sort who falls in love with the first woman he sleeps with.’

  ‘Oh Charlie!’

  The boy said, ‘Have you decided yet, or shall I come back?’

  ‘Stick around.’

  We passed a couple of minutes choosing and changing our minds. I ordered at random a twelve-year-old Haut-Médoc. It occurred to me that I was the one paying for my birthday treat. I cancelled the order and asked for a twenty-year-old bottle of the same.

  The waiter left and we paused to consider where we were.

  Miranda said, ‘Are you seeing someone else?’

  The question astonished me and for a moment I was stuck for the most reassuring and convincing reply. At the same time, I noticed that the chef, who was also the owner, had come from behind the counter and was making his way between the tables to the door. The waiter was following him. I glanced over my shoulder and saw through the glass two figures out on the pavement. One of them was folding away an umbrella.

  I must have looked evasive to Miranda. She added, ‘Just be honest with me. I don’t mind.’

  She clearly did mind and I gave her my full attention.

  ‘Absolutely not. You’re all I care about.’

  ‘When I’m out all day at seminars?’

  ‘I work and I think about you.’

  I felt a draught of cool air on my neck. Miranda’s gaze shifted from me to the door and I felt I could turn again and look. The chef was helping two elderly men out of their long raincoats which he dumped into the arms of the waiter. The men were led to their table – set apart and the only one with a lit candle. The taller man had swept-back silvery hair and wore a brown silk scarf loosely knotted around his neck and some kind of artist’s cotton jacket that drooped from his shoulders. A chair was held out for him and before sitting he looked around the room and nodded to himself. No one else in the restaurant seemed interested. The man’s style of bohemian grandeur was not so unusual in Soho. But I was excited.

  I turned back to Miranda, still aware of her surprising query, and placed my hand on hers.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Alan Turing.’

  ‘Your hero.’

  ‘And Thomas Reah, the physicist. Invented loop quantum gravity more or less single-handed.’

  ‘Go and say hello.’

  ‘That would not be cool.’

  So we returned to the question of the someone else I was not seeing, and once she appeared satisfied, we went back to Adam and discussed how we might overcome his resistance to the kill switch. She suggested hiding the charging cables until he was too weak to resist us. I reminded her of his instant origami sailboat. He would improvise a power cable in minutes. My concentration was poor during this exchange. I kept looking at her, hallucinating a glow around her head and shoulders, and thinking about the time when we would be alone, travelling the smooth and rising curve to ecstasy. Even as I was hobbled by a state of continuous sexual arousal, it excited me to be in the same room as a great man. From pre-war meditations on the idea of a universal computing machine, to Bletchley in the early years of the war, to morphogenesis, to his glorious patrician present. The greatest living Englishman, noble and free in his love for another man. In his seniority, dressed with the flamboyance of a rock star, a genius painter, a knighted actor. I could see him only if I turned rudely away from Miranda. I resisted. I distracted myself with the usual list, the buried suspicions, all we had not touched on – the Salisbury court case and the death threat being the most rank. Where was my courage when I lacked the clarity to raise these subjects, when they tormented me while they remained unspoken?

  ‘You’re not even listening.’

  ‘I am, I am. You said Adam’s got a screw loose.’

  ‘I didn’t. Idiot. But happy birthday.’

  We raised our glasses again. The Médoc was bottled when Miranda was two years old and my father was moving out of swing into bebop.

  The meal was a success, but the bill was a long time coming. While we waited we decided on a parting cognac. The drinks the waiter brought were double measures, on the house. Miranda returned to the business of her father’s illness. The new diagnosis was lymphoma, of a slow-acting kind. He was likely to die with it rather than of it. He had much else to die of. But there was a pill he now took that made him cheerful and assertive – and even more of a handful. Impossible projects filled his thoughts. He wanted to sell the Salisbury house and buy an apartment in New York, in the East Village, not the current one, she suspected, but the Village of his youth. On a rush of self-belief, he had signed a contract to deliver a coffee-table book on the folklore of British birds – a vast project that he could never hope to complete, even with a full-time researcher. On a strange whim, given his views, he had joined a fringe political group dedicated to taking Britain out of the European Union. He was up for election as treasurer at his London club, the Athenaeum. Every day he phoned his daughter with new schemes. Everything I heard made me gloomier about our proposed visit, but I said nothing.

  At last we were done and we shrugged on our coats. Miranda preceded me towards the door. Our path between the tables would take us close to Turing’s. As we approached, I saw that apart from a bowl of nuts, hardly touched, the distinguished diners had eaten nothing. They were here to talk and drink. In an ice bucket was a half-bottle of Dutch genever, and on the table were ice cubes in a silver dish and two cut-glass tumblers. I was impressed. Would I be so game at seventy? Turing was facing me directly. The years had lengthened his face, marking out the cheekbones, giving him a keen ferocious look. Many years later I thought I saw the ghost of Alan Turing in the figure of the painter, Lucian Freud. I crossed his path late one night as he came out of the Wolseley in Piccadilly. Same lean fitness in early old age that seemed derived less from healthy living than from a hunger to keep on creating.

  The decision was taken for me by the cognac. I approached as millions before me had approached a famous presence in a public place, with outward humility masking the entitlement that genuine admiration confers. Turing glanced up at me, then looked away. Dealing with admirers was Reah’s business. I wasn’t drunk enough to be unembarrassed and I stumbled over the formulaic opener.

  ‘Really sorry to intrude. I just wanted to express my profound gratitude to you both for your work.’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ Reah said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Charlie Friend.’

  ‘Very nice to have met you, Charlie.’

  The tense was clear. I came to my point. ‘I read that you have one of these Adams or Eves. I’ve got one too. I wondered if you’ve experienced any sort of problem with …’

  I trailed away because I had seen Reah look at
Turing, who had firmly shaken his head.

  I took out my card and put it on their table. Neither man looked at it. I retreated, muttering my foolish apologies. Miranda was right beside me. She took my hand and as we stepped out into Greek Street she gave a sympathetic squeeze.

  *

  ‘In her loving look,

  a whole universe contained.

  Love the universe!’

  This was the first of his poems that Adam recited to me. He had come into my bedroom without knocking just after eleven one morning, while I was working at my screen, hoping to take advantage of volatility in the currency markets. There was a square of sunlight on the carpet and he made a point of standing in it. I noticed he was wearing one of my turtleneck sweaters. He must have taken it from my drawer. He told me he had a poem he urgently needed to recite. I swivelled in my chair and waited.

  When he finished I said unkindly, ‘Short at least.’

  He winced. ‘A haiku.’

  ‘Ah. Nineteen syllables.’

  ‘Seventeen. Five then seven then five again. Here’s another.’ He paused, looked towards the ceiling.

  ‘Kiss the space where she

  trod from here to the window.

  She made prints in time.’

  I said, ‘Spacetime?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘One more. I’ve got to get on.’

  ‘I’ve got hundreds. But look …’

  He left his illuminated spot and came to my desk and put his hand over the mouse. ‘These two rows of figures, don’t you see? Intersecting Fibonacci curves. A high probability that if you buy here and wait … now sell. Look. You made £31.’

  ‘Do that again.’

  ‘Best to wait.’

  ‘Then do me one more haiku and leave.’

  He returned to his square of light.

  ‘You and the moment

  Came when I touched your—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that.’

  ‘I shouldn’t show it to her?’

  I sighed and he moved away. As he reached the door I added, ‘Clean up the kitchen and bathroom, would you please? Difficult to do with one hand.’

  He nodded and went away. A kind of peace or stability had settled over our household, despite the matter of Gorringe’s release. I was more relaxed. Adam was spending no time alone with Miranda, while I was with her every night. I was confident he would keep his promise. He had told me several times that he was in love, and chaste love was fine by me. He wrote poems in his thoughts and stored them there. He wanted to talk to me about Miranda but I usually cut him off. I didn’t dare attempt to power him down and I had no particular need. The plan to get him back to the salesroom was set aside. Love appeared to have softened him. For reasons I didn’t understand, he was eager for my approval. Guilt, perhaps. He had fallen back into a routine of vague obedience. I remained cautious because of my wrist and I was watchful – but nothing of that showed. I reminded myself that he was still my experiment, my adventure. It was not supposed to run smooth at every turn.

  With Adam’s love came intellectual exuberance. He insisted on telling me his latest thoughts, his theories, his aphorisms, his latest reading. He was putting himself through a course on quantum mechanics. All night, while he charged up, he contemplated the mathematics and the basic texts. He read Schrödinger’s Dublin lectures, What is Life?, from which he concluded that he was alive. He read the transcript of the celebrated 1927 Solvay conference, when the luminaries of physics met to discuss photons and electrons.

  ‘It was said that at these early Solvay meetings there took place the most profound exchanges about nature in the history of ideas.’

  I was at breakfast. I told him I’d once read that the elderly Einstein, while at Princeton in his final years, started each day with eggs fried in butter and that in Adam’s honour, I was frying two now for myself.

  Adam said, ‘People said he never grasped what he himself had started. Solvay was a battlefield for him. Outnumbered, poor fellow. By extraordinary young men. But that was unfair. The young Turks weren’t concerned with what nature is, only with what one could say about it. Whereas Einstein thought there was no science without belief in an external world independent of the observer. He didn’t think quantum mechanics was wrong so much as incomplete.’

  This after one night’s study. I remembered my hopeless brief entanglement with physics at college, before I found safety in anthropology. I suppose I was a little jealous, especially when I learned that Adam had got his mind round Dirac’s equation. I cited Richard Feynman’s remark that anyone who claims to understand quantum theory doesn’t understand quantum theory.

  Adam shook his head. ‘A bogus paradox, if it’s even a paradox at all. Tens of thousands understand it, millions make use of it. It’s a matter of time, Charlie. General relativity was once at the outer edge of difficulty. Now it’s routine for first-year undergraduates. The same was true of the calculus. Now fourteen-year-olds can do it. One day quantum mechanics will pass into common sense.’

  By this time, I was eating my eggs. Adam had made the coffee. It was far too strong. I said, ‘OK. What about that Solvay question? Is quantum mechanics a description of nature or just an effective way of predicting things?’

  ‘I would have been on Einstein’s side. I don’t understand the doubt about it,’ he said. ‘Quantum mechanics makes predictions to such a fabulous degree of accuracy, it must be getting something right about nature. To creatures of our immense size, the material world looks blurred and feels hard. But now we know how strange and wonderful it is. So it shouldn’t surprise us that consciousness, your sort and mine, could arise from an arrangement of matter – it’s clearly odd to just the right degree. And we don’t have anything else to explain how matter can think and feel.’ Then he added, ‘Except for beams of love from the eyes of God. But then, beams can be investigated.’

  Another morning, after he had told me how he had been thinking all night of Miranda, he said, ‘I’ve also been thinking about vision and death.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We don’t see everywhere. We can’t see behind our heads. We can’t even see our chins. Let’s say our field of vision is almost 180 degrees, counting in peripheral awareness. The odd thing is, there’s no boundary, no edge. There isn’t vision and then blackness, like you get when you look through binoculars. There isn’t something, then nothing. What we have is the field of vision, and then beyond it, less than nothing.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So this is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It’s a foretaste, Charlie, and it’s there all day.’

  ‘Nothing to be afraid of then,’ I said.

  He raised both hands as if to grip and shake a trophy. ‘Exactly right! Less than nothing to be afraid of!’

  Was he covering for an anxiety about death? His term was fixed for approximately twenty years. When I asked, he said, ‘That’s the difference between us, Charlie. My body parts will be improved or replaced. But my mind, my memories, experiences, identity and so on will be uploaded and retained. They’ll be of use.’

  Poetry was another instance of his exuberance in love. He had written 2,000 haikus and had recited about a dozen, of the same quality, each one devoted to Miranda. I’d been interested at first in learning what Adam could create. But I soon lost interest in the form itself. Too cute, too devoted to not making much sense, too undemanding of their author as they played on empty mysteries of the sound-of-one-hand-clapping sort. 2,000! The figure made my point – an algorithm was churning them out. I said all this as we walked the backstreets of Stockwell – our daily exercise to extend Adam’s social skills. We’d been into shops, pubs and had even taken a trip on the Tube to Green Park and sat on the grass among the lunchtime crowds.

  Perhaps I was too harsh. Haikus, I told him, could be stifling in their stillness. But I was also encouragin
g. Time to move on to another form. He had access to all the world’s literature. Why not attempt a poem with verses of four lines, rhyming or not? Or even a short story and eventually a novel?

  Early that evening he gave me his response. ‘If you don’t mind, I’m ready to discuss your suggestions.’

  I was not long out of the shower, freshly dressed and on my way upstairs, therefore a little impatient. On the table, waiting to come with me, was a bottle of Pomerol. There was a conversation I needed to have with Miranda. Gorringe was due to be released in seven weeks. We still hadn’t decided what to do. There was an assumption that Adam could act as her bodyguard and I was worried – I was legally responsible for anything he might do. She had been back to the local police station. The detective who had visited Gorringe in prison had moved on. The desk sergeant had taken a note and advised her to phone emergency in the event of trouble. She had suggested that it might be difficult, if she was being bludgeoned at the time. The sergeant did not take this to be facetious. He advised her to make the call before that eventuality.

  ‘When I see him coming up the garden path with an axe?’

  ‘Yes. And don’t open the door.’

  She had seen a solicitor about going before a judge to get an exclusion order. Success was not certain and it wasn’t clear what it would achieve. She had asked her father not to divulge her address to anyone. But Maxfield had worries of his own and she thought he’d forget. We were left with the hope that the threat wasn’t serious and that Adam would be a deterrent. When I asked her how dangerous Gorringe really was, she said, ‘He’s a creep.’

  ‘A dangerous creep?’

  ‘A disgusting creep.’

  I wasn’t in the right mood for another conversation with Adam about poetry.

  ‘My opinion,’ he said, ‘is that the haiku is the literary form of the future. I want to refine and extend the form. Everything I’ve done so far is a kind of limbering up. My juvenilia. When I’ve studied the masters and understood more, especially when I’ve grasped the power of the kireji, the cutting word that separates the two juxtaposed parts, my real work can begin.’