Machines Like Me

Charlie goes to the hospital to have a cast put on his wrist; while in the waiting room, he searches the internet for details of Miranda’s case and learns that she accused Peter Gorringe of raping her. Reports from the trial are divided, with some sources not believing Miranda’s story because she’s accused of bringing a bottle of vodka with her to meet Gorringe, throwing her motives into question.

He returns home, and Miranda initiates intimacy with him. She wants Adam to be checked over by his programmer’s technicians before they take him to meet her father. Adam apologizes for breaking Charlie’s wrist, but his emotional distress only prompts Charlie to consider further the line separating human and machine. Charlie threatens Adam with using his kill switch if Adam harms him again, to which Adam replies that he disabled his kill switch.

The next day is Charlie’s birthday. He meets Miranda at a small yet extravagant restaurant for a celebratory dinner. Alan Turing and his partner Thomas Reah enter the restaurant. Charlie stops at their table while leaving and asks whether Turing’s artificial human is behaving strangely. He receives no response, so he leaves his card.

Garbage workers continue to strike. Using artificial humans with basic programming to replace these workers fails, and the garbage continues to pile up throughout the city. Adam begins writing romantic haikus for Miranda and studying classical physics. Charlie largely ignores Adam’s attempts to hold an intellectual conversation, as Charlie is disinterested. He’s focused entirely on his love for Miranda and the deeper intimacy their relationship has acquired. Adam proposes his theory of a universal consciousness through a brain-machine interface that would allow instant access to understanding others as well as making deceit impossible.

Miranda receives a phone call from her father. He informs her that Peter Gorringe was let out of prison early, three weeks ago, and visited his home. Because her father is confused and ill, he gave Miranda’s address to Gorringe.

Adam, Charlie, and Miranda discuss Gorringe and whether he still intends to kill Miranda. She admits that Gorringe never actually raped her and that she planned to frame him for the crime as an act of revenge. During their last year of high school, Miranda’s childhood friend Mariam was raped by Gorringe. She told Miranda of the event but swore her to secrecy, worried that her family wouldn’t accept her if they knew. Mariam became depressed, and a few months after the rape, her depression drove her to death by suicide. Miranda never revealed to Mariam’s family what she knew, instead seeking to bring Gorringe to justice by pretending that she herself was raped by him. Miranda was haunted by guilt over never telling Mariam’s family the truth. With this confession, Miranda finally opens up to Charlie, and their “conversation, in the form of our love, could properly begin” (177). Miranda is no longer secretive.

Alan Turing calls and requests that Charlie meet him at his lab to discuss his experiences with Adam. Two weeks after Miranda’s confession, Charlie goes to Turing’s home, noticing the signs of growing social and political discontent as he takes public transportation through London. Another demonstration protesting the government causes a traffic backup. Charlie joins Turing in his home—and because Charlie idolizes Turing, he’s eager to tell him everything about Adam, including his disabling of the kill switch and his love for composing haikus.

Turing reveals that he’s in contact with 18 other artificial humans’ owners, 11 of whom report that their Adams or Eves deactivated their kill switches. A handful of other artificial humans brought about death by suicide through intentionally corrupting their programming. Turing suspects that the more these artificial humans experience human emotions, contradictions, and nonintuitive decisions, the more they desire to escape from human society. The narrative compares machine learning to a child’s learning processes, highlighting a child’s ability to play as the key difference. Turing dismisses the idea that the personality Charlie and Miranda created for Adam has any true value, holding that machine learning and experiential knowledge is a greater determining factor in an artificial human’s behavior.