She whispered, ‘Tell me something. Are you real?’
I didn’t reply.
She turned her head away so that I saw her in profile as her eyes closed and she lost herself once more in a maze of private pleasure.
Later that night, I asked her about it. ‘It was nothing,’ was all she said before she changed the subject. Was I real? Meaning did I really love her, or was I honest, or did I fit her needs so exactly that she might have dreamed me up?
I crossed the kitchen to pour the last of the wine. The broken fridge door handle needed a sharp sideways pull to engage its lock. As my hand closed round the cold neck of the bottle, I heard a sound, a creak above my head. I had lived long enough beneath Miranda’s feet to know her steps and their precise direction. She had moved across her bedroom and was hesitating in the threshold of her kitchen. I heard the murmur of her voice. No reply. She took another two steps into the room. The next would bring her onto a floorboard that under pressure made a truncated quacking sound. As I waited to hear it, Adam spoke. He pushed his chair back as he stood. If he was to take another step he would need to untether himself. This he must have achieved because it was his tread that landed on the noisy floorboard. That meant they were standing less than a metre apart, but there was no sound until a minute had passed, and now it was footsteps, two sets, moving back towards the bedroom.
I left the fridge door open because the sound of it closing would betray me. No choice but to shadow them into my bedroom. So I went and stood by my desk and listened. I reckoned I was right under her bed when I heard the murmur of her voice, a command. She must have wanted air in the room, for Adam’s steps tracked across the room towards the Victorian bay. Only one of its three windows opened. Even that one was hard to shift on a warm or rainy day. The old wooden frames shrank or expanded, and something was wrong with the counterweight and hardened rope. Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighbourhood to fix a sash window, though a few had tried.
And how was my mind as I stood directly below, in an identical bay, reproduced by the thousands in late-Victorian industrial-scale developments? They had spilled across the five-acre fields of hedgerow and boundary oaks that adorned the southern limits of London. Not good – my mind, that is. Embodied, it told all. Shivering, moist, especially on the palms, raised pulse, in a state of elated anticipation. Fear, self-doubt, fury. In my bay, old fitted carpet, stained and worn since the mid-fifties, extended right to the skirting boards. In Miranda’s, the carpet gave way to bare boards that, two world wars back, must have been polished to a nut-brown gleam. Some poor girl in white apron and mob cap, on all fours, waxed cloth in hand, never could have dreamed of the kind of being who would one day stand in the place where she crouched. I heard him plant his feet on the old wood, I imagined him stooping to grip the window by the metal fixtures on its lower frame and heave upwards with the strength of four young men. There was a silence of straining resistance before the entire window shot upwards and hit the top casing with a rifle crack and a shattering of glass. My snort of delight could have given me away.
No shortage now of marginally cooler air filling the room. My glee faded as Adam’s footsteps returned to where Miranda waited by the bed. As he went towards her, it might have been an apology that he muttered. Here was the sound of her forgiving him, for her brief sentence was followed by the entwined mezzo and tenor of their laughter. I had trailed after Adam and was once more by the bed, six feet under. He had the manual skills to undress her and he was undressing her now. What else would occupy their silence? I knew – of course I knew – that her mattress made no sound. Futons, with their Japanese promise of a clean and simple life of stripped-back clarity, were the fashion then. And I myself felt washed in clarity, senses cleansed as I stood in the dark and waited. I could have run up the stairs and prevented them, burst into the bedroom like the clownish husband in an old seaside postcard. But my situation had a thrilling aspect, not only of subterfuge and discovery, but of originality, of modern precedence, of being the first to be cuckolded by an artefact. I was of my times, riding the breaking crest of the new, ahead of everyone in enacting that drama of displacement so frequently and gloomily predicted. Another element of my passivity: even at this earliest moment, I knew I had brought the whole thing down on myself. But that was for later. For now, despite the horror of betrayal, it was all too interesting and I couldn’t stir from my role of eavesdropper, the blind voyeur, humiliated and alert.
It was my mind’s eyes, or my heart’s, that watched as Adam and Miranda lay down on the unyielding embrace of the futon and found the comfortable posture for a clasp of limbs. I watched as she whispered in his ear, but I didn’t hear the words. She had never whispered in my ear at such times. I saw him kiss her – longer and deeper than I had ever kissed her. The arms that heaved up the window frame were tightly around her. Minutes later I almost looked away as he knelt with reverence to pleasure her with his tongue. This was the celebrated tongue, wet and breathily warm, adept at uvulars and labials, that gave his speech its authenticity. I watched, surprised by nothing. He didn’t fully satisfy my beloved then, as I would have, but left her arching her slender back, eager for him as he arranged himself above her with smooth, slow-loris formality, at which point my humiliation was complete. I saw it all in the dark – men would be obsolete. I wanted to persuade myself that Adam felt nothing and could only imitate the motions of abandonment. That he could never know what we knew. But Alan Turing himself had often said and written in his youth that the moment we couldn’t tell the difference in behaviour between machine and person was when we must confer humanity on the machine. So when the night air was suddenly penetrated by Miranda’s extended ecstatic scream that tapered to a moan and then a stifled sob – all this I actually heard twenty minutes after the shattering of the window – I duly laid on Adam the privilege and obligations of a conspecific. I hated him.
Early the following morning, for the first time in years, I tipped into my coffee a heaped spoon of sugar. I watched the confined, nut-brown disc of fluid turn then slow in its clockwise motion, then lose all purpose in a chaotic swirl. Tempting, but I resisted a metaphor for my own existence. I was trying to think and it was barely seven thirty. Soon, Adam or Miranda or both would appear at my door. I wanted my thoughts and attitude in coherent form. After a night of broken sleep, I was depressed as well as angry with myself, and determined not to appear so. Miranda had kept her distance from me and so, by contemporary standards, a night with someone else, even something else, was not quite a betrayal. As for the ethical dimensions of Adam’s behaviour, here was a history with a curious beginning. It was during the miners’ strike of twelve years before that self-driving cars first appeared on experimental sites, mostly disused airfields, where movie set designers had constructed imitation streets, motorway junctions, and various hazards.
‘Autonomous’ was never the right word, for the new cars were as dependent as newborn babies on mighty networks of computers linked to satellites and on-board radar. If artificial intelligence was to guide these vehicles safely home, what set of values or priorities should be assumed in the software? Fortunately, in moral philosophy there already existed a well-explored set of dilemmas known in the business as ‘the trolley problem’. Adapted easily to cars, the sort of problem manufacturers and their software engineers now posed was this: you, or rather, your car is driving at the maximum legal speed along a narrow suburban road. The traffic is flowing nicely. On the pavement on your side of the road is a group of children. Suddenly, one of them, a child of eight, runs out across the road, right into your path. There’s a fraction of a second to make a decision – either mow the child down, swerve onto the crowded pavement, or into the oncoming traffic and collide head on with a truck at a closing speed of eighty miles an hour. You’re alone, so that’s fine, sacrifice or save yourself. What if your spouse and your two children are in the car? Too easy? What if it’s your only daughter, or your grandparents, or your pregnant daughter and your son-in-law, both in their mid-twenties? Now, take into account the occupants of the truck. A fraction of a second is more than enough time for a computer to give thorough consideration to all the issues. The decision will depend on the priorities ordered by the software.