Machines like me : and people like you

Title:

Author:

McEwan, Ian, author.

ISBN:

9780385545112

Personal Author:

McEwan, Ian, author.

Edition:

First United States edition.

Publication Information:

New York : Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, [2019]

Physical Description:

333 pages ; 22 cm

Abstract:

In an alternative 1980s London, Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers 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 batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he co-designs Adam's personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong, and clever -- a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart?

Subject Term:

Artificial intelligence -- Fiction.

Androids -- Fiction.

Man-woman relationships -- England -- Fiction.

Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction.

Alternative histories (Fiction) (OCoLC)fst01736708

Androids. (OCoLC)fst01198480

Artificial intelligence. (OCoLC)fst00817247

Man-woman relationships. (OCoLC)fst01007080

Triangles (Interpersonal relations) (OCoLC)fst01156439

Geographic Term:

London (England) -- History -- 20th century -- Fiction.

England -- London. (OCoLC)fst01204271

Genre:

Fiction.

History.

Psychological fiction.

Alternative histories (Fiction)

Novels.

Document ID:

SD_ILS:2318750

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Collection	Collection	Call Number	Status
Searching... Atwater Branch Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC MACE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Coalinga District Library (Coalinga-Huron)	Searching... Unknown	Fiction Area	F MCE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fig Garden Branch (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	MCEWAN IA Machine	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Gillis Branch Library (Fresno Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	MCEWAN IA Machine	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Madera County Library (Madera Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Fiction Shelves	MCEWAN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mariposa Branch Library (Mariposa Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction Area	FIC McE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Merced Main Library (Merced Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC MACE	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Ridgecrest Branch Library (Kern Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Adult Fiction	FIC McEWAN IAN	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.)	Searching... Unknown	Fiction Area	FIC MCEWAN IAN	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement and Saturday --"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.

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 soon forms, and these three beings confront a profound moral dilemma.

Don't miss Ian McEwan's new novel, Lessons , coming in September!

Author Notes

Ian McEwan was born in Aldershot, England on June 21, 1948. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Sussex and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He writes novels, plays, and collections of short stories including In Between the Sheets, The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Innocent, Black Dogs, The Daydreamer, Enduring Love, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act and Nutshell.

He has won numerous awards including the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award for First Love, Last Rites; the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award and the 1993 Prix Fémina Etranger for The Child in Time; the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction for Amserdam; the 2002 W. H. Smith Literary Award, the 2003 National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, the 2003 Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the 2004 Santiago Prize for the European Novel for Atonement; and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Saturday.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

McEwan's thought-provoking novel (after Nutshell) is about the increasingly fraught relationship between a man, a woman, and a synthetic human. Opening in an alternate 1982 London in which technology is not dissimilar from today's (characters text and send emails), 32-year-old Charlie spends A£86,000 of his inheritance on the "first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks," who can pass for human unless closely inspected. His name is Adam (there are 12 Adams and 13 Eves total; the Eves sell out first), and Charlie designs Adam's personality along with his neighbor and girlfriend Miranda. Soon, Adam informs Charlie that he "should be careful of trusting her completely," and quickly falls in love with her, thus inextricably binding their fates together. The novel's highlight is Adam, a consistently surprising character who quickly disables his own kill switch and composes an endless stream of haiku dedicated to Miranda because, as he states, "the lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of things as they are, will be the only necessary form" as misunderstanding is eradicated in the future. The novel loses steam when Adam's not the focus: much page space is devoted to a thread about an orphan boy, as well as Charlie's thoughts and feelings about Miranda. Though the reader may wish for a tighter story, this is nonetheless an intriguing novel about humans, machines, and what constitutes a self. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

As in McEwan's previous novel, Nutshell (2016), told from the point of view of a fetus, this much-revered writer again stretches himself. Here he imagines an alternate history in which technology advanced much faster than in real time, and the great polymath Alan Turing lived much longer. The narrator, Charlie, lives in south London in the 1980s, and he decides to invest his sizable inheritance in an Adam, one of the first fully conscious androids. Charlie and his much younger girlfriend, Miranda a stupendous creation navigate this new world together, and as Adam struggles with what he is, McEwan explores complex themes of consciousness, being, and self as well as the impact Adam's existence has on Charlie and Miranda. While the alternate history is at times clunky and distracting, the comparisons between contemporary British politics and the 1980s are apt. McEwan makes an odd but inventive premise work spectacularly well; it enables him to explore nearly every hot-button issue, and it is fascinating to witness one of the finest living novelists delve into topics of such pertinence and complexity.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: McEwan's literary audaciousness ensures ongoing, elevated interest in each new book.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist

Guardian Review

McEwan returns to his subversive early style with this dystopian vision of humanoid robots in a counterfactual 1982 Britain By a strange twist of fate, I read this book while on a visit to the Falkland Islands, where the British victory over Argentina in the 1982 war feels as though it might have happened last week. Outside Port Stanley, on treeless uplands whose names ring distant bells - Goose Green, Mount Harriet, Tumbledown - the conflict is still unofficially memorialised by chunks of crashed war planes and the wires of field telephones from a pre-digital age. Machines Like Me , Ian McEwan's new novel, also turns in part on the Falklands conflict, eternalising a version of that year's events, though in the book's fictional world things have turned out rather differently. In the 1982 of the novel, the British navy sails from Portsmouth with calamitous results. A devastating Argentinian attack ends the war abruptly and the Falklands become Las Malvinas. The humiliation of defeat forces Margaret Thatcher from office, brings a very different politician to power, and triggers the country's unexpected departure from Europe. This political and social upheaval feels like both reminiscence and prophecy. The counterfactual 1982 of the novel plays variations on our historical record and contains clear allusions to the present. "Only the Third Reich and other tyrannies decided policies by plebiscites and generally no good came from them," the narrator reminds the inhabitants of post-referendum Britain. More pertinently for the plot, another marked difference from history is that the United Kingdom of this 1982 is precociously computerised. Instead of having been hounded to death for his homosexuality, the scientist Alan Turing is thriving and lauded. His pioneering work in artificial intelligence has led to a series of technological breakthroughs: the result is that the latest and most expensive device in consumer electronics is "a manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression". One of the first people to part with £86,000 is the novel's narrator, self-confessed AI nerd Charlie Friend: "Robots, androids, replicates were my passion," he informs us. Charlie is 32 and lives alone in a small flat in Clapham, south London, where he plays the stock market from a home computer without much success. He explains that he is only able to afford his extravagant purchase thanks to a recent inheritance from his mother. For reasons that are never entirely clear, only 25 of the devices are available, 13 Adams and 12 Eves, in a variety of ethnicities. Charlie would prefer an Eve, but they have all been snapped up, so he has to make do with an Adam, whom he brings home and unboxes. "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." There are many pleasures and moments of profound disquiet in this book, which shows McEwan's mastery of storytelling The visceral uncanniness of this scene foreshadows the discomforting directions the novel will take once Adam's batteries are charged. But his initial awakening is teasingly slow. It's a tantalising moment that will remind older readers of the bittersweet feeling of buying a home computer in the 1980s, when the excitement of getting the purchase home was tempered by the realisation that it would take two days to partition the hard drive. As Charlie waits for the robot to come alive, he watches the news about the Falklands conflict and eats a cheese and pickle sandwich. The other key element of the setup is that isolated Charlie is embarking on a relationship with his upstairs neighbour, Miranda, 10 years younger and a doctoral scholar of social history. He envisages his ownership of the new device as a joint endeavour, a kind of digital parenthood that will bring him and Miranda closer. Like some of his other rationalisations - not least his explanation of why he has spent his inheritance on a robot - it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. However, his plans are dealt a blow when one of the newly conscious Adam's first actions is to blurt out a warning to Charlie about Miranda's past. Machines Like Me belongs to the genre of speculative fiction, but in its narrow focus on morally ambiguous characters in a bleak cityscape it also owes a debt to film noir, sharing noir's conviction that nothing is more human than moral inconsistency. Charlie is broke, has a flaky employment history, and was lucky to miss out on a prison sentence for tax fraud. Miranda, a woman hiding a dark secret, is clearly a femme fatale. Now these characters are joined by Adam, a supremely intelligent and rather well-endowed robot, who very quickly figures out how to override his off-switch. As the true nature of Miranda's secret becomes clear, the three characters are drawn together, with Adam taking on the contradictory roles of servant and moral superior. Further complexity comes in the shape of Mark, a young mistreated boy who awakens Miranda's desire for a more conventional, non-technological form of parenthood. Adam is the most compelling character in the book, with an unforgettably strange physical presence. We are told that even when unconscious he gives off the faint scent of saxophone lubricant and that he achieves erections thanks to a reservoir of distilled water in his right buttock. Having read most of world literature, he predicts the imminent death of the novel - hardly a new idea, but one he argues from a fresh point of view. Everything in fiction, he points out, describes varieties of human failure. "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 ... Our literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku ... will be the only necessary form." In the bloodless world Adam describes, a novel such as Machines Like Me would be neither accurate nor necessary, turning as it does on the mess, lies and complexity of flawed human interactions. The book touches on many themes: consciousness, the role of chance in history, artificial intelligenceAI, the neglected Renaissance essayist Sir William Cornwallis, the formal demands of the haiku and the unsolved P versus NP problem of computer science, but its real subject is moral choice. The epigraph quotes Rudyard Kipling's poem " The Secret of the Machines ", which presciently expresses the uncompromising quality of the machine mind. "We are not built to comprehend a lie," the poem goes. In Adam's digital brain, there may be fuzzy logic, but there's no fuzzy morality. This clarity gives him an inhuman iciness. The quote is also a reminder that Kipling dabbled in science fiction himself and that, consciously or unconsciously, most modern practitioners of the genre are indebted to him for pioneering a particular technique. This is the mode of exposition in which he seems to address the reader from a position of shared knowledge, sketching out an unfamiliar reality through hints and allusions, but never explaining it too completely. This inside-out style is the default mode of modern SF. It is economical and of special usefulness to makers of strange worlds, plunging a reader into a new reality and leaving them space to feel like a participant in its creation. It's the opposite technique to that of McEwan's narrator, who explicitly sets out his world, overexplains the historical context and never turns down a chance to offer an essayistic digression. To my taste, this is a flat-footed way of doing sci-fi. And, since you can't possibly explain everything, the reader is sometimes left wondering why the narrator hasn't also told you what's happening in the cold war, or China, or how he has ended up with a glass of Moldovan white wine in 1982, when the country, then Moldavia, was part of the USSR. A further weakness is a reliance on long expositional speeches that it's hard to imagine anyone actually saying. Miranda is the worst offender, but elsewhere Turing explains the history of AI in a voice identical to the narrator's, which is itself rather similar to Adam's. One obvious sci-fi conceit would have been to have the robot narrate the novel, but given Charlie's tendency towards bloodless cerebration, I suspect the result would not have been much different. With these caveats, there are many pleasures and many moments of profound disquiet in this book, which reminds you of its author's mastery of the underrated craft of storytelling. The narrative is propulsive, thanks to our uncertainties about the characters' motives, the turning points that suddenly reconfigure our understanding of the plot, and the figure of Adam, whose ambiguous energy is both mysteriously human and mysteriously not. Like the replicants in his novel, McEwan has made himself available in various models over the years. Machines Like Me is closer in character to the dark and subversive McEwan of his earlier books than to the stiff and self-conscious one of Saturday , who seemed burdened by the responsibility of finding himself head boy of English letters. The novel is morally complex and very disturbing, animated by a spirit of sinister and intelligent mischief that feels unique to its author.

Kirkus Review

The British author's latest novel concerns a triangle formed by two humans and one android in an alternate version of England.The year is 1982, the British are about to lose the Falklands War, and Alan Turing is not only still alive, but his work has helped give rise to a line of androids almost indistinguishable from humans. The narrator, Charlie Friend, an aimless 32-year-old, inherits enough money to buy one of the pricey robots. He and Miranda, the younger woman living above him, each supply half the "personality parameters" required to push Adam past his factory presets. Before long, as things between the humans seem to be getting serious, Charlie finds himself the first man "to be cuckolded by an artefact." They all survive the fling, although Charlie imagines he detects "the scent of warm electronics on her sheets," and Adam turns lovesick, composing 2,000 haiku for Miranda (namesake of the Bard's character who famously utters: "O brave new world, / That has such people in't"). Early on, the android has told Charlie that Miranda is a liar and might harm him without providing details. These statements flag a fateful backstory comprising a teenage Miranda, two schoolmates, and a death threat. Along the way to a busy and disturbing ending, Charlie makes a connection with Turing that allows for some nerd-pleasing kibble like "non-deterministic polynomial time." McEwan (Nutshell, 2016, etc.) brings humor and considerable ethical rumination to a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence. But his human characters seem unfinished, his plot a bit ragged. And why the alternate 1982 England, other than to fire a few political shots about the Falklands, Thatcher, and Tony Benn? Does the title make sense as either clause or complete sentence? Are we meant to imagine the "real" author as a present-day Adam?McEwan is a gifted storyteller, but this one is as frustrating as it is intriguing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Excerpts

ONE It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holygrail 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 ourdesires 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 Falkland 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 maintenanceof 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-perfectneutrality 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 northof the river, I had emails to write. By the early seventies, digital communication had discarded its air of convenience andbecome 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 intelligence became more like us, than 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 printingout 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 suspiciousof 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 feelsuncomfortable 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 ofeach 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 optionswould 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. Excerpted from Machines Like Me: A Novel by Ian McEwan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.