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 encouraging. 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.’
From upstairs I heard the phone ring and Miranda’s footsteps across my ceiling.
Adam said, ‘As a thinking man with an interest in anthropology and politics, you won’t be much interested in optimism. But beyond the currents of disheartening facts about human nature and societies and daily bad news, there can be mightier stirrings, positive developments that are lost to view. The world is so connected now, however crudely, and change is so widely distributed that progress is hard to perceive. I don’t like to boast, but one of those changes is right in front of you. The implications of intelligent machines are so immense that we’ve no idea what you – civilisation, that is – have set in motion. One anxiety is that it will be a shock and an insult to live with entities that are cleverer than you are. But already, almost everyone knows someone cleverer than themselves. On top of which, you underestimate yourselves.’
I could make out Miranda’s voice on the phone. She was agitated. She was walking up and down her sitting room as she spoke.
Adam appeared not to hear her but I knew he had. ‘You won’t allow yourselves to be left behind. As a species, you’re far too competitive. Even now, there are paralysed patients with electrodes implanted in the motor strip of their brains who merely think of the action and can raise an arm or bend a finger. This is a humble beginning and there are many problems to solve. They’ll certainly be solved, and when they are, and a brain–machine interface is efficient and cheap, you’ll become a partner with your machines in the open-ended expansion of intelligence, and of consciousness generally. Colossal intelligence, instant access to deep moral acumen and to everything known, but more importantly, access to each other.’
Miranda’s pacing upstairs had ceased.
‘It could be the end of mental privacy. You’ll probably come to value it less in the face of the enormous gains. You might be wondering what relevance any of this has to the haiku. It’s this. Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve been surveying the literature of scores of countries. Magnificent traditions, gorgeous elaborations of—’
Her bedroom door closed, steps swiftly crossed her sitting room to her door. It slammed shut and I heard her footsteps on the stairs.
‘Apart from lyrical poetry celebrating love or landscape, almost everything I read in literature—’
Her key was in my door and then she was before us. Her face had a greasy shine. She was doing her best to keep a level voice. ‘That was my father on the phone. They let Gorringe out early. Three weeks ago. He’s been to Salisbury, to the house, talked his way past the housekeeper and got my address out of my father. He could be on his way here now.’
She lowered herself into the nearest kitchen chair. I too sat down.
Adam took in Miranda’s news and nodded. But he pressed on into our silence. ‘Nearly everything I’ve read in the world’s literature describes varieties of human failure – of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failures of cognition, honesty, kindness, self-awareness; superb depictions of murder, cruelty, greed, stupidity, self-delusion, above all, profound misunderstanding of others. Of course, goodness is on show too, and heroism, grace, wisdom, truth. Out of this rich tangle have come literary traditions, flourishing, like the wild flowers in Darwin’s famous hedgerow. Novels ripe with tension, concealment and violence as well as moments of love and perfect formal resolution. But when the marriage of men and women to machines is complete, this literature will be redundant because we’ll understand each other too well. We’ll inhabit a community of minds to which we have immediate access. Connectivity will be such that individual nodes of the subjective will merge into an ocean of thought, of which our Internet is the crude precursor. As we come to inhabit each other’s minds, we’ll be incapable of deceit. Our narratives will no longer record endless misunderstanding. Our literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form. I’m sure we’ll treasure the literature of the past, even as it horrifies us. We’ll look back and marvel at how well the people of long ago depicted their own shortcomings, how they wove brilliant, even optimistic fables out of their conflicts and monstrous inadequacies and mutual incomprehension.’