In evidence, Miranda was emphatic that she had no friend called Amelia and that the story of the text was a fabrication. Two of Miranda’s old school friends gave evidence in court that they had never heard mention of this Amelia. The prosecution suggested that it was too convenient, a vanishing rootless teenager. If she was on a beach in Thailand, and if Miranda was her friend, where were the customary teenage photos and messages? Where was Miranda’s original message? Where was that merry emoticon?
Deleted by Miranda, said the defence. If the court would suspend proceedings and serve an order on the British subsidiary of the phone company to release its copies of the texts, these disputed versions of a summer evening would be settled. But the judge, whose manner throughout was impatient, even irritable, was in no mind to let the matter drag on. Mr Gorringe’s defence had already had many months to mount their case. A court order should have been sought long ago. Memorably, the judge noted that a young woman who took a bottle of vodka to a young man’s room should have been aware of the risks. Some press reports portrayed Gorringe as a guilty sort. He was large, loose-limbed, he lounged in the dock, he didn’t wear a tie. He appeared not to be awed by the judge or his court and its procedures. The jury was unanimous in favouring Miranda’s story over his. Later, in his summing-up, the judge did not find the accused a credible witness. But certain sections of the press were sceptical about Miranda’s story. The judge was criticised for not putting the matter beyond doubt by calling in her text records.
A week later, before sentencing, there were pleas of mitigation. The headmaster of their school spoke up for both ex-pupils – hardly helpful. Gorringe’s mother, who was too scared to be articulate, tried bravely but wept from the witness stand. No use at all to her son. He rose for sentencing and was impassive. Six years. He shook his head, as the accused often do. If he behaved himself in prison, he would be gone for half his sentence.
The jury had confronted a stark choice. Miranda raped and honest, or unmolested and a cruel liar. Naturally, I could bear neither. I didn’t take Gorringe’s murderous threats as proof of his innocence, as the intentions of a wronged man looking for redress. A guilty man could be furious at his loss of freedom. If he could threaten to kill, he could surely rape.
Beyond the either-or was a dangerous middle ground where the half-forgotten student anthropologist in me could free his imagination of all constraint. Grant the insidious power of self-persuasion, mix in some hours of carefree teenage drinking and blurred recall, then it would have been possible for Miranda to feel genuinely that she’d been violated, especially if afterwards there were elements of shame; equally possible for Peter Gorringe to convince himself he had permission when he desired it so urgently. But in the criminal courts, the sword of justice fell on innocence or guilt, not both at once.
The story of the missing texts was particular, inventive, easily verified or disproved. By telling it to the court, Gorringe as rapist may have calculated that he had nothing to lose. A wild fiction and he almost got away with it. If he was innocent, if the texts existed, then the system had let him down. Either way, it had let itself down. His story should have been checked. On that, I was with the sceptical press. The blame could lie with an inexperienced legal aid team, too hard-pressed, too sloppy. Or with policemen greedy for success. And certainly with an ill-tempered judge.
On my way back from the Common, I slowed as I turned into my road. Now I knew as much as Adam. I hadn’t spoken to him since the evening before. After a painful, sleepless night, I had got up early to go to the hospital. As I went through the kitchen I had passed close by him. He was sitting at the kitchen table as usual, connected to his power line. His eyes were open and had that tranquil, faraway look whenever he retreated into his circuits. I had hesitated there for a whole minute, wondering what I had got into with my purchase. He was far more complicated than I’d imagined, and so were my own feelings about him. We had to confront each other, but I was exhausted from two broken nights and needed to get to the hospital.
What I wanted now, returning from my walk, was to retreat to my bedroom for a dose of painkillers and a nap. But he was standing facing me as I came in. At the sight of my arm suspended in its sling, he gave a cry of astonishment or horror. He came towards me, arms spread.
‘Charlie! I am so sorry. So sorry. What a terrible thing I did. I honestly didn’t intend it. Will you please, please accept my most sincere apologies.’
It looked as though he was about to embrace me. With my free hand, I pushed past – I disliked the too-solid feel of him – and went to the sink. I turned on the tap and bent low to drink deeply. When I turned, he was standing close, no more than three or four feet away. The moment of apology had passed. I was determined to look relaxed – not so easy with my arm in a sling. I put my free hand on my hip and looked into his eyes, into the nursery blue with its little black seeds. I still wondered what it meant, that Adam could see, and who or what did the seeing. A torrent of zeros and ones flashed towards various processors that, in turn, directed a cascade of interpretation towards other centres. No mechanistic explanation could help. It couldn’t resolve the essential difference between us. I had little idea of what passed along my own optic nerve, or where it went next, or how these pulses became an encompassing self-evident visual reality, or who was doing my seeing for me. Only me. Whatever the process was, it had the trick of seeming beyond explanation, of creating and sustaining an illuminated part of the one thing in the world we knew for sure – our own experience. It was hard to believe that Adam possessed something like that. Easier to believe that he saw in the way a camera does, or the way a microphone is said to listen. There was no one there.
But as I looked into his eyes, I began to feel unhinged, uncertain. Despite the clean divide between the living and the inanimate, it remained the case that he and I were bound by the same physical laws. Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure standing before me wasn’t fully alive. In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once – towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time, into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took.
I came out of this reverie with a start. I confronted an immediate and unpleasant situation and wasn’t inclined to accept Adam as a brother, or even a very distant cousin, however much stardust we shared. I had to stand up to him. I started talking. I told him how I came by a large sum of money after my mother’s death and the sale of her house. How I decided to invest it in a grand experiment, to buy an artificial human, an android, a replicate – I forget which term I used. In his presence, they all sounded like insults. I told him exactly how much I paid. Then I described for him the afternoon when Miranda and I carried him on a stretcher into the house, unpacked him, charged him up, when I tenderly gave him my clothes, and discussed the formation of his personality. As I went along, I wasn’t certain of my purpose, or why I was talking so fast.
It was only when I got there that I knew what I had to say. My point was this: I had bought him, he was mine, I had decided to share him with Miranda, and it would be our decision, and only ours, to decide when to deactivate him. If he resisted, and especially if he caused injury as he had the night before, then he would have to be returned to the manufacturer for readjustment. I finished by saying that this was Miranda’s view, as she expressed it earlier this afternoon, just before we made love. This last intimate detail, for the lowest of reasons, I needed him to know.