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    Machines Like Me: A Novel
    Machines Like Me: A Novel
    Machines Like Me: A Novel
    Ebook361 pages5 hours

    Machines Like Me: A Novel

    By Ian McEwan

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding.

    Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence—Machines Like Me powerfully portrays two lovers who will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first generation of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he codesigns Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and smart—and a love triangle soon forms. Ian McEwan's subversive, gripping novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human—our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 23, 2019
    ISBN9780385545129
    Author

    Ian McEwan

    Ian McEwan (Aldershot, Reino Unido, 1948) se licenció en Literatura Inglesa en la Universidad de Sussex y es uno de los miembros más destacados de su muy brillante generación. En Anagrama se han publicado sus dos libros de relatos, Primer amor, últimos ritos (Premio Somerset Maugham) y Entre las sábanas, las novelas El placer del viajero, Niños en el tiempo (Premio Whitbread y Premio Fémina), El inocente, Los perros negros, Amor perdurable, Amsterdam (Premio Booker), Expiación (que ha obtenido, entre otros premios, el WH Smith Literary Award, el People’s Booker y el Commonwealth Eurasia), Sábado (Premio James Tait Black), En las nubes, Chesil Beach (National Book Award), Solar (Premio Wodehouse), Operación Dulce, La ley del menor, Cáscara de nuez, Máquinas como yo, La cucaracha y Lecciones y el breve ensayo El espacio de la imaginación. McEwan ha sido galardonado con el Premio Shakespeare. Foto © Maria Teresa Slanzi.

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    Reviews for Machines Like Me

    3.5/5

    368 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Sometimes, it feels like Ian McEwan is just using his characters as vessels to trumpet his knowledge. How else could you explain a protagonist who thinks about the evolution of medicine and algorithms in his free time? Adam also talked a lot about quantum mechanics, which was hard to understand. The story was saved by its weighty themes of justice, revenge, and morals. Charlie owns Adam but is the money earned by the latter also Charlie's? Charlie and Miranda wanted to hide the latter's crime but Adam didn't let them. Can a machine be more ethical than humans?
    • 4/5
      Lots to think about here. Very weird twisting of history.
    • 5/5
      This brisk, amusing novel about robots and people is set in an alternative 1980's Britain, in which Turing lives and technology is far advanced. It is so advanced that it produces humanoid robots, one of which is purchased by Charlie, our not very impressive hero. The ways in which the humanoid -- Adam -- becomes involved in the lives of Charlie and his lover Miranda produces an absorbing (and funny) novel. But within the novel are embedded arguments about big ideas -- what is "human", where is technology taking us, why can people be so evil, and so on and so forth. Terrific read.
    • 1/5
      This was a fail for me. I almost dropped it after the first third, but persevered until three quarters of the way through.
      There is a very thin cast of characters, with even thinner characterisation. The plot is asinine and predictable.
      There was the basis for a good book here, but it never delivered.
      I've enjoyed other books by the author, but I'm going to be a little cautious before I venture into another of his works.
    • 2/5
      Machines Like Me is a sci-fi story of a man, Charlie Friend, who purchases an arificial machine "Adam". He spends his inheritance from his mother on this robotic creature. Along with his upstairs neighbor and lover, Miranda, they program Adam and he becomes part of their lives. Along the way, Adam digs into their lives and exposes some truths about them. Just a bizarre story, and way too much time was spent on their bedroom rituals.
      If you are going to read a sci-fi book about AI companions, read Klara and the Sun, which in my opinion is far better.
    • 3/5
      I've liked a lot of McEwan's previous work. This... was not his best. He's still a talented, engaging writer, and he's trying to deal with a lot of interesting ideas. The problem is that speculative fiction is clearly not his comfort zone. The backstory reads like he just wanted to cram in a lot of things that he found fun, rather than weaving it together into a coherent narrative. In this alternate universe, technology is vastly ahead, yet British politics has continued on its previous course. This may sound nitpicky, but it reflects his slapdash understanding and concern for the arc of history--technology was in fact intimately tied to political developments.

      The narrative feels oddly slow for a book this length--the pacing is really not up to speed, and the characters don't entirely make sense.

      It could have been much more than it was.
    • 4/5
      McEwan balances the thoughtful and the creepy in deft strokes, and this book is no different. Amidst his commentary on humanity versus robots comes a fascinating exploration of alternative history, at the moment of the Falklands crisis. This is a McEwan I'd like to return to or offer as a seminar text someday. 4.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      A very good and believable alternative universe that seems strangely very familiar. Good plotting and also clever characterisation, with philosophical musings on the nature of humanity. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      An alternative future set in the past. As an early adopter, the main character appeared to be remarkably blasé about his new companion. The android's moral code was a bit dubious! Interesting philosophical options, but ultinately then main focus of the novel was, in my opinion, slightly misplaced.
    • 4/5
      Feels like an actual science fiction novel, rather than a literary author slumming it in genre (I see you, Kazuo Ishiguro).
    • 2/5
      Couldn't finish this one. The idea of the fate of Turing changing the timeline is interesting, but the main story just did not seem worth investing the time to read it.
    • 3/5
      The topic is too worn out in my recent reading to seem novel. I didn't think the alternate history added much.
    • 2/5
      After I read the first chapter of this novel, I thought this might be the best sci-fi novel I've read in years. It....was not.

      The idea is fantastic and compelling, but it gets constantly bogged down in endless paragraphs about the political shenanigans of the alternate-history London McEwan has created for his characters. I skimmed pages and pages, trying to get to the meat of the story I actually cared about.

      About a 2.5, for me.
    • 5/5
      A surprising journey into an alternate universe with insights into what it means to be human

      What does it mean to be human, can artificial intelligence create art now or ever? Saving Turing from his fate in our universe and version of history and changing events while leaving so many characters in place brings in a wry commentary about what it means to be human. If art is craft and machines are built by craft and become able to replicate themselves are they producing art - and is their version of fine art going to be about something else - a communication about what it means to be a machine as our fine art is a communication about what it means to be human.
    • 3/5
      Having been awestruck by McEwan's "Nutshell" a year earlier, I eagerly picked up "Machines Like Me." The premise sounded fascinating: "a cautionary fable about artificial intelligence." To say I was disappointed was an understatement. I almost stopped reading a third of the way into the book — until I spotted a LibraryThing review that suggested the work improves in the second half. I finally gave up two-thirds of the way through. I simply didn't care about any of the characters. Part of the problem is red-flagged in a review posted on TheGuardian.com that mentions "long-winded speeches." After the fourth of fifth soliloquy, it was pretty much over for me. Unlike TheGuardian.com review which concluded that McEwan's work offers "many pleasures," I found "Machines Like Me" a drag. McEwan's masterful writing merits a couple stars. But this tale simply didn't grab me in any way.
    • 5/5
      Ian McEwan has a brilliant mind. I must admit I wasn't sure about reading this book from the description but, since I've read all of his books since Amsterdam I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did. Such a unique plot, such beautiful writing. Then just when you think that maybe it's becoming too ordinary of a story, something happens to pull you in again. Besides having such a unique wonderful plot and beautiful writing, the book makes you think and also refreshes some mid-20th century historical events. Definitely read.
    • 4/5
      "Machines Like Me takes place in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys "Adam", one of the first synthetic humans and- with Miranda's help- he designs Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and clever. It isn't long before a love triangle forms, and these three beings confront a profound moral dilemma. "- inside flyleaf
      Leave it to the master storyteller, McEwan, to make the not quite possible, possible and believable. As always, his exquisite word choice and use of just enough detail, and his knack for making us identify with his characters, even when their flaws and questionable choices create a sense of foreboding. One of the most original sci-fi books I've read in some time on AI and in an "alternative" 1980s setting to boot - amazing.

    Book preview

    Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan

    ONE

    It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science. Our ambitions ran high and low—for a creation myth made real, for a monstrous act of self-love. As soon as it was feasible, we had no choice but to follow our desires and hang the consequences. In loftiest terms, we aimed to escape our mortality, confront or even replace the Godhead with a perfect self. More practically, we intended to devise an improved, more modern version of ourselves and exult in the joy of invention, the thrill of mastery. In the autumn of the twentieth century, it came about at last, the first step towards the fulfilment of an ancient dream, the beginning of the long lesson we would teach ourselves that however complicated we were, however faulty and difficult to describe in even our simplest actions and modes of being, we could be imitated and bettered. And I was there as a young man, an early and eager adopter in that chilly dawn.

    But artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived, so when they did, they seemed to some a disappointment. The imagination, fleeter than history, than technological advance, had already rehearsed this future in books, then films and TV dramas, as if human actors, walking with a certain glazed look, phony head movements, some stiffness in the lower back, could prepare us for life with our cousins from the future.

    I was among the optimists, blessed by unexpected funds following my mother’s death and the sale of the family home, which turned out to be on a valuable development site. The first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression, went on sale the week before the Falklands Task Force set off on its hopeless mission. Adam cost £86,000. I brought him home in a hired van to my unpleasant flat in north Clapham. I’d made a reckless decision, but I was encouraged by reports that Sir Alan Turing, war hero and presiding genius of the digital age, had taken delivery of the same model. He probably wanted to have his lab take it apart to examine its workings fully.

    Twelve of this first edition were called Adam, thirteen were called Eve. Corny, everyone agreed, but commercial. Notions of biological race being scientifically discredited, the twenty-five were designed to cover a range of ethnicities. There were rumours, then complaints, that the Arab could not be told apart from the Jew. Random programming as well as life experience would grant to all complete latitude in sexual preference. By the end of the first week, all the Eves sold out. At a careless glance, I might have taken my Adam for a Turk or a Greek. He weighed 170 pounds, so I had to ask my upstairs neighbour, Miranda, to help me carry him in from the street on the disposable stretcher that came with the purchase.

    While his batteries began to charge, I made us coffee, then scrolled through the 470-page online handbook. Its language was mostly clear and precise. But Adam was created across different agencies and in places the instructions had the charm of a nonsense poem. Unreveal upside of B347k vest to gain carefree emoticon with motherboard output to attenuate mood-swing penumbra.

    At last, with cardboard and polystyrene wrapping strewn around his ankles, he sat naked at my tiny dining table, eyes closed, a black power line trailing from the entry point in his umbilicus to a thirteen-amp socket in the wall. It would take sixteen hours to fire him up. Then sessions of download updates and personal preferences. I wanted him now, and so did Miranda. Like eager young parents, we were avid for his first words. There was no loudspeaker cheaply buried in his chest. We knew from the excited publicity that he formed sounds with breath, tongue, teeth and palate. Already his lifelike skin was warm to the touch and as smooth as a child’s. Miranda claimed to see his eyelashes flicker. I was certain she was seeing vibrations from the Tube trains rolling a hundred feet below us, but I said nothing.

    Adam was not a sex toy. However, he was capable of sex and possessed functional mucous membranes, in the maintenance of which he consumed half a litre of water each day. While he sat at the table, I observed that he was uncircumcised, fairly well endowed, with copious dark pubic hair. This highly advanced model of artificial human was likely to reflect the appetites of its young creators of code. The Adams and Eves, it was thought, would be lively.

    He was advertised as a companion, an intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum who could wash dishes, make beds and think. Every moment of his existence, everything he heard and saw, he recorded and could retrieve. He couldn’t drive as yet and was not allowed to swim or shower or go out in the rain without an umbrella, or operate a chainsaw unsupervised. As for range, thanks to breakthroughs in electrical storage, he could run seventeen kilometres in two hours without a charge or, its energy equivalent, converse non-stop for twelve days. He had a working life of twenty years. He was compactly built, square-shouldered, dark-skinned, with thick black hair swept back; narrow in the face, with a hint of hooked nose suggestive of fierce intelligence, pensively hooded eyes, tight lips that, even as we watched, were draining of their deathly yellowish-white tint and acquiring rich human colour, perhaps even relaxing a little at the corners. Miranda said he resembled a docker from the Bosphorus.

    Before us sat the ultimate plaything, the dream of ages, the triumph of humanism—or its angel of death. Exciting beyond measure, but frustrating too. Sixteen hours was a long time to be waiting and watching. I thought that for the sum I’d handed over after lunch, Adam should have been charged up and ready to go. It was a wintry late afternoon. I made toast and we drank more coffee. Miranda, a doctoral scholar of social history, said she wished the teenage Mary Shelley was here beside us, observing closely, not a monster like Frankenstein’s, but this handsome dark-skinned young man coming to life. I said that what both creatures shared was a hunger for the animating force of electricity.

    We share it too. She spoke as though she was referring only to herself and me, rather than all of electrochemically charged humanity.

    She was twenty-two, mature for her years and ten years younger than me. From a long perspective, there was not much between us. We were gloriously young. But I considered myself at a different stage of life. My formal education was far behind me. I’d suffered a series of professional and financial and personal failures. I regarded myself as too hard-bitten, too cynical for a lovely young woman like Miranda. And though she was beautiful, with pale brown hair and a long thin face, and eyes that often appeared narrowed by suppressed mirth, and though in certain moods I looked at her in wonder, I’d decided early on to confine her in the role of kind, neighbourly friend. We shared an entrance hall and her tiny apartment was right over mine. We saw each other for a coffee now and then to talk about relationships and politics and all the rest. With pitch-perfect neutrality she gave the impression of being at ease with the possibilities. To her, it seemed, an afternoon of intimate pleasure with me would have weighed equally with a chaste and companionable chat. She was relaxed in my company and I preferred to think that sex would ruin everything. We remained good chums. But there was something alluringly secretive or restrained about her. Perhaps, without knowing it, I had been in love with her for months. Without knowing it? What a flimsy formulation that was!

    Reluctantly, we agreed to turn our backs on Adam and on each other for a while. Miranda had a seminar to attend north of the river, I had emails to write. By the early seventies, digital communication had discarded its air of convenience and become a daily chore. Likewise the 250 mph trains—crowded and dirty. Speech-recognition software, a fifties miracle, had long turned to drudge, with entire populations sacrificing hours each day to lonely soliloquising. Brain–machine interfacing, wild fruit of sixties optimism, could barely arouse the interest of a child. What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.

    Would Adam become a bore? It’s not easy, to dictate while trying to ward off a bout of buyer’s remorse. Surely other people, other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

    What was tedious was the prospect of the user’s guide. Instructions. My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep. On an old-fashioned impulse, I was printing out the manual, then looking for a folder. All the while, I continued to dictate emails.

    I couldn’t think of myself as Adam’s user. I’d assumed there was nothing to learn about him that he could not teach me himself. But the manual in my hands had fallen open at Chapter Fourteen. Here the English was plain: preferences; personality parameters. Then a set of headings—Agreeableness. Extraversion. Openness to experience. Conscientiousness. Emotional stability. The list was familiar to me. The Five Factor model. Educated as I was in the humanities, I was suspicious of such reductive categories, though I knew from a friend in psychology that each item had many subgroups. Glancing at the next page I saw that I was supposed to select various settings on a scale of one to ten.

    I’d been expecting a friend. I was ready to treat Adam as a guest in my home, as an unknown I would come to know. I’d thought he would arrive optimally adjusted. Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate. My friends, family and acquaintances all had appeared in my life with fixed settings, with unalterable histories of genes and environment. I wanted my expensive new friend to do the same. Why leave it to me? But of course I knew the answer. Not many of us are optimally adjusted. Gentle Jesus? Humble Darwin? One every 1,800 years. Even if it knew the best, the least harmful parameters of personality, which it couldn’t, a worldwide corporation with a precious reputation couldn’t risk a mishap. Caveat emptor.

    God had once delivered a fully formed companion for the benefit of the original Adam. I had to devise one for myself. Here was Extraversion and a graded set of childish statements. He loves to be the life and soul of the party and He knows how to entertain people and lead them. And at the bottom, He feels uncomfortable around other people and He prefers his own company. Here in the middle was, He likes a good party but he’s always happy to come home. This was me. But should I be replicating myself? If I was to choose from the middle of each scale I might devise the soul of blandness. Extraversion appeared to include its antonym. There was a long adjectival list with boxes to tick: outgoing, shy, excitable, talkative, withdrawn, boastful, modest, bold, energetic, moody. I wanted none of them, not for him, not for myself.

    Apart from my moments of crazed decisions, I passed most of my life, especially when alone, in a state of mood neutrality, with my personality, whatever that was, in suspension. Not bold, not withdrawn. Simply here, neither content nor morose, but carrying out tasks, thinking about dinner or sex, staring at the screen, taking a shower. Intermittent regrets about the past, occasional forebodings about the future, barely aware of the present, except in the obvious sensory realm. Psychology, once so interested in the trillion ways the mind goes awry, was now drawn to what it considered the common emotions, from grief to joy. But it had overlooked a vast domain of everyday existence: absent illness, famine, war or other stresses, a lot of life is lived in the neutral zone, a familiar garden, but a grey one, unremarkable, immediately forgotten, hard to describe.

    At the time, I was not to know that these graded options would have little effect on Adam. The real determinant was what was known as machine learning. The user’s handbook merely granted an illusion of influence and control, the kind of illusion parents have in relation to their children’s personalities. It was a way of binding me to my purchase and providing legal protection for the manufacturer. Take your time, the manual advised. Choose carefully. Allow yourself several weeks, if necessary.

    I let half an hour pass before I checked on him again. No change. Still at the table, arms pushed out straight before him, eyes closed. But I thought his hair, deepest black, was bulked out a little and had acquired a certain shine, as though he’d just had a shower. Stepping closer, I saw to my delight that though he wasn’t breathing, there was, by his left breast, a regular pulse, steady and calm, about one a second by my inexperienced guess. How reassuring. He had no blood to pump around, but this simulation had an effect. My doubts faded just a little. I felt protective towards Adam, even as I knew how absurd it was. I stretched out my hand and laid it over his heart and felt against my palm its calm, iambic tread. I sensed I was violating his private space. These vital signs were easy to believe in. The warmth of his skin, the firmness and yield of the muscle below it—my reason said plastic or some such, but my touch responded to flesh.

    It was eerie, to be standing by this naked man, struggling between what I knew and what I felt. I walked behind him, partly to be out of range of eyes that could open at any moment and find me looming over him. He was muscular around his neck and spine. Dark hair grew along the line of his shoulders. His buttocks displayed muscular concavities. Below them, an athlete’s knotted calves. I hadn’t wanted a superman. I regretted once more that I’d been too late for an Eve.

    On my way out of the room I paused to look back and experienced one of those moments that can derange the emotional life: a startling realisation of the obvious, an absurd leap of understanding into what one already knows. I stood with one hand resting on the doorknob. It must have been Adam’s nakedness and physical presence that prompted the insight, but I wasn’t looking at him. It was the butter dish. Also, two plates and cups, two knives and two spoons scattered across the table. The remains of my long afternoon with Miranda. Two wooden chairs were pushed back from the table, turned companionably towards each other.

    We had become closer this past month. We talked easily. I saw how precious she was to me and how carelessly I could lose her. I should have said something by now. I’d taken her for granted. Some unfortunate event, some person, a fellow student, could get between us. Her face, her voice, her manner, both reticent and clear-headed, were sharply present. The feel of her hand in mine, that lost, preoccupied manner she had. Yes, we had become very close and I’d failed to notice it was happening. I was an idiot. I had to tell her.

    I went back into my office, which doubled as my bedroom. Between the desk and the bed there was enough space in which to walk up and down. That she knew nothing about my feelings was now an anxious matter. Describing them would be embarrassing, perilous. She was a neighbour, a friend, a kind of sister. I would be addressing a person I didn’t yet know. She would be obliged to step out from behind a screen, or remove a mask and speak to me in terms I had never heard from her. I’m so sorry…I like you very much but, you see…Or she’d be horrified. Or, just possibly, overjoyed to hear the one thing she had longed for, or to say herself but dreaded rejection.

    By chance, we were currently both free. She must have thought about it, about us. It was not an impossible fantasy. I would have to tell her face to face. Unbearable. Unavoidable. And so it went on, in tightening cycles. Restless, I went back next door. I saw no change in Adam as I brushed past to get to the fridge, where there was a half-full bottle of white Bordeaux. I sat facing him and raised my glass. To love. This time, I felt less tenderness. I saw Adam for what it was, an inanimate confection whose heartbeat was a regular electrical discharge, whose skin warmth was mere chemistry. When activated, some kind of microscopic balance-wheel device would prise open his eyes. He would seem to see me, but he would be blind. Not even blind. When it kicked in, another system would give a semblance of breath, but not of life. A man newly in love knows what life is.

    With the inheritance, I could have bought a place somewhere north of the river, Notting Hill, or Chelsea. She might even have joined me. She would’ve had space for all the books that were boxed up in her father’s garage in Salisbury. I saw a future without Adam, the future that was mine until yesterday: an urban garden, high ceilings with plaster mouldings, stainless-steel kitchen, old friends to dinner. Books everywhere. What to do? I could take him, or it, back, or sell it online and take a small loss. I gave it a hostile look. The hands were palms down on the table, the hawkish face remained angled towards the hands. My foolish infatuation with technology! Another fondue set. Best to get away from the table before I impoverished myself with a single swipe of my father’s old claw hammer.

    I drank no more than half a glass, then I returned to the bedroom to distract myself with the Asian currency markets. All the while I listened out for footsteps in the flat above me. Late into the evening, I watched TV to catch up on the Task Force that would soon set off across 8,000 miles of ocean to recapture what we then called the Falkland Islands.

    —

    At thirty-two, I was completely broke. Wasting my mother’s inheritance on a gimmick was only one part of my problem—but typical of it. Whenever money came my way, I caused it to disappear, made a magic bonfire of it, stuffed it into a top hat and pulled out a turkey. Often, though not in this recent case, my intention was to conjure a far larger sum with minimal effort. I was a mug for schemes, semi-legal ruses, cunning shortcuts. I was for grand and brilliant gestures. Others made them and flourished. They borrowed money, put it to interesting use and remained enriched even as they settled their debts. Or they had jobs, professions, as I once had, and enriched themselves more modestly, at a steady rate. I meanwhile leveraged or, rather, shorted myself into genteel ruin, into two damp ground-floor rooms in the dull no-man’s-land of Edwardian terraced streets between Stockwell and Clapham, south London.

    I grew up in a village near Stratford, Warwickshire, the only child of a musician father and community-nurse mother. Compared to Miranda’s, my childhood was culturally undernourished. There was no time or space for books, or even music. I took a precocious interest in electronics but ended up with an anthropology degree from an unregarded college in the south Midlands; I did a conversion course to law and, once qualified, specialised in tax. A week after my twenty-ninth birthday I was struck off, and came close to a short spell in prison. My hundred hours of community service convinced me that I should never have a regular job again. I made some money out of a book I wrote at high speed on artificial intelligence: lost to a life-extension-pill scheme. I made a reasonable sum on a property deal: lost to a car-rental scheme. I was left some funds by a favourite uncle who had prospered by way of a heat-pump patent: lost to a medical-insurance scheme.

    At thirty-two, I was surviving by playing the stock and currency markets online. A scheme, just like the rest. For seven hours a day I bowed before my keyboard, buying, selling, hesitating, punching the air one moment, cursing the next, at least at the beginning. I read market reports, but I believed I was dealing in a random system and mostly relied on guesses. Sometimes I leaped ahead, sometimes I plunged, but on average through the year I made about as much as the postman. I paid my rent, which was low in those days, ate and dressed well enough and thought I was beginning to stabilise, learning to know myself. I was determined that my thirties would be a superior performance to my twenties.

    But my parents’ pleasant family home was sold just as the first convincing artificial person came on the market. 1982. Robots, androids, replicates were my passion, even more so after my research for the book. Prices were bound to fall, but I had to have one straight away, an Eve by preference, but an Adam would do.

    It could have turned out differently. My previous girlfriend, Claire, was a sensible person who trained to be a dental nurse. She worked in a Harley Street practice and she would have talked me out of Adam. She was a woman of the world, of this one. She knew how to arrange a life. And not only her own. But I offended her with an act of undeniable disloyalty. She disowned me in a scene of regal fury, at the end of which she threw my clothes out into the street. Lime Grove. She never spoke to me again and belonged at the top of my list of errors and failures. She could have saved me from myself.

    But. In the interests of balance, let that unsaved self speak up. I didn’t buy Adam to make money. On the contrary. My motives were pure. I handed over a fortune in the name of curiosity, that steadfast engine of science, of intellectual life, of life itself. This was no passing fad. There was a history, an account, a time-deposit, and I had a right to draw on it. Electronics and anthropology—distant cousins whom late modernity has drawn together and bound in marriage. The child of that coupling was Adam.

    So, I appear before you, witness for the defence, after school, 5 p.m., typical specimen for my time—short trousers, scabby knees, freckles, short back and sides, eleven years old. I’m first in line, waiting for the lab to open and for Wiring Club to begin. Presiding is Mr. Cox, a gentle giant with carroty hair who teaches physics. My project is to build a radio. It’s an act of faith, an extended prayer that has taken many weeks. I have a base of hardboard, six inches by nine, easily drilled. Colours are everything. Blue, red, yellow and white wires run their modest courses around the board, turning at right angles, disappearing below to emerge elsewhere and be interrupted by bright nodules, tiny vividly striped cylinders—capacitors, resistors—then an induction coil I have wound myself, then an op-amp. I understand nothing. I follow a wiring diagram as a novice might murmur scripture. Mr. Cox gives softly spoken advice. I clumsily solder one piece, one wire or component, to another. The smoke and smell of solder is a drug I inhale deeply. I include in my circuit a toggle switch made of Bakelite which, I’ve persuaded myself, came out of a fighter plane, a Spitfire surely. The final connection, three months after my beginning, is from this piece of dark brown plastic to a nine-volt battery.

    It’s a cold, windy dusk in March. Other boys are hunched over their projects. We are twelve miles away from Shakespeare’s hometown, in what will come to be known as a bog-standard comprehensive school. An excellent place, in fact. The fluorescent ceiling lights come on. Mr. Cox is on the far side of the lab with his back turned. I don’t want to attract his attention in case of failure. I throw the switch and—miracle—hear the sound of static. I jiggle the variable-tuning capacitor: music, terrible music, as I think, because violins are involved. Then comes the rapid voice of a woman, not speaking English.

    No one looks up, no one is interested. Building a radio is nothing special. But I’m speechless, close to tears. No technology since will amaze me as much. Electricity, passing through pieces of metal carefully arranged by me, snatches from the air the voice of a foreign lady sitting somewhere far away. Her voice sounds kindly. She isn’t aware of me. I’ll never learn her name or understand her language, and never meet her, not knowingly. My radio, with its irregular blobs of solder on a board, appears no less a wonder than consciousness itself arising from matter.

    Brains and electronics were closely related, so I discovered through my teens as I built simple computers and programmed them myself. Then complicated computers. Electricity and bits of metal could add up numbers, make words, pictures, songs, remember things and even turn speech into writing.

    When I was seventeen, Peter Cox persuaded me to study physics at a local college. Within a month I was bored and looking to change. The subject was too abstract, the maths was beyond me. And by then I’d read a book or two and was taking an interest in imaginary people. Heller’s Catch-18, Fitzgerald’s The High-Bouncing Lover, Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy’s All’s Well That Ends Well—I didn’t get much further and yet I saw the point of art. It was a form of investigation. But I didn’t want to study literature—too intimidating, too intuitive. A single-sheet course summary I picked up in the college library announced anthropology as the science of people in their societies through space and time. Systematic study, with the human factor thrown in. I signed up.

    The first thing to learn: my course was pitifully underfunded. No bunking off for a year to the Trobriand Islands, where, I read, it was taboo to eat in front of others. It was good manners to eat alone, with your back turned to friends and family. The islanders had spells to make ugly people beautiful. Children were actively encouraged to be sexual with each other. Yams were the viable currency. Women determined the status of men. How strange and bracing. My view of human nature had been shaped by the mostly white population crammed into the southern quarter of England. Now I was set free into bottomless relativism.

    At the age of nineteen I wrote a wise essay on honour cultures entitled Mind-forged Manacles? Dispassionately, I gathered up my case studies. What did I know or care? There were places where rape was so common it didn’t have a name. A young father’s throat was cut for failing in his duties to an ancient feud. Here was a family eager to kill a daughter for being seen holding hands with a lad from the wrong religious group. There, elderly women keenly assisted in the genital mutilation of their granddaughters. What of the instinctive parental impulses to love and protect? The cultural signal was louder. What of universal values? Upended. Nothing like this in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was all about the mind, the tradition, the religion—nothing but software, I now thought, and best regarded in value-free terms.

    Anthropologists did not pass judgement. They observed and reported on human variety. They celebrated difference. What was wicked in Warwickshire was unremarkable in Papua New Guinea. Locally, who was to say what was good or bad? Certainly not a colonial power. I derived from my studies some unfortunate conclusions about ethics which led me a few years later to the dock in a county court, accused of conspiring with others to mislead the tax authorities on a grand scale. I did not attempt to persuade His Honour that far from his court might be a coconut beach where such conspiracy was respected. Instead, I came to my senses just before I addressed the judge. Morals were real, they were true, good and bad inhered in the nature of things. Our actions must be judged on their terms. This was what I’d assumed before anthropology came along. In quavering, hesitant tones I apologised abjectly to the court and dodged a custodial sentence.

    —

    When I entered the kitchen in the morning, later than usual, Adam’s eyes were open. They were pale blue, flecked with minuscule vertical rods of black. The eyelashes were long and thick, like a child’s. But his blink mechanism had not yet kicked in. It was set at irregular intervals and adjusted for mood and gestures, and primed to react to the actions and

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