Charlie Friend Character Analysis

Before us sat the ultimate plaything, the dream of ages, the triumph of humanism—or its angel of death.

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 displays 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.

I felt the need, rather childish, to demonstrate that I was in charge. I said, “Adam, will you walk round the table a couple of times? I want to see how you move.”

“Sure.”

There was nothing mechanical about his gait. In the confines of the room he managed a long stride. When he’d been round twice he stood by his chair, waiting.

Behind me, Adam was in place at the table, gazing towards the window. I finished and was drying my hands on a tea towel as I went over to him. Despite my sunny mood, I could not forgive his disloyalty. I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. There were boundaries of ordinary decency he needed to learn—hardly a challenge for his neural networks. His heuristic shortcomings had encouraged my decision. When I had learned more, when Miranda had done her share, he could come back into our lives.

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought. I found myself jogging towards the playground’s fence, stepping over it, taking three paces and putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

Adam’s insights, even when valid, were socially inept.

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 then night air suddenly penetrated by Miranda’s extended ecstatic scream that tapered to a moan and then a stifled sob […] I duly laid on Adam the privilege and obligations of a conspecific. I hated him.

[Adam] was supposed to be my moral superior. I would never meet anyone better. Had he been my friend, he would have been guilty of a cruel and terrible lapse. The problem was that I had bought him, he was my expensive possession and it was not clear what his obligations to me were, beyond a vaguely assumed helpfulness. What does the slave owe to the owner? Also, Miranda did not “belong” to me. This was clear. I could hear her tell me that I had no good cause to feel betrayed.

“The issue isn’t Adam’s state of mind. It’s yours.”

“Listen,” I said. “If he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he is. I made the same assumption about you. About everybody. We all do. You fucked him. I’m angry. I’m amazed you’re surprised. If that’s what you really are.”

Mark’s gaze never left Miranda’s face. He was entranced. Now she picked him up and cradled him as she danced around the room, singing “Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle.” I wondered if Adam had the capacity to understand the joy of dance, of movement for its own sake, and whether Miranda was showing him a line he couldn’t cross. If so, she may have been wrong. Adam could imitate and respond to emotions and appear to take pleasure in reasoning. He might also have known something of the purposeless beauty of art.

“Nearly everything I’ve read in the world’s literature describes varieties of human failure—of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failure 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. […] 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. […] 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 literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of thigs as they are, will be the only necessary form.”

When Miranda had finished her story, there was the silence, and then we had talked. After a while, I had turned to Adam. “Well?”

He took a few seconds, then he had said, “Very dark.”

A rape, a suicide, a wrongly kept secret—of course it was dark. I was in an emotional state and I didn’t ask him to explain. Now, lying next to Miranda as she slept, I wondered if he meant something more significant, the consequence of this thinking, if that was really what it…depends on definitions…That was when I too fell asleep.

“But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends.”

“Then, it seems, they go through a stage of expressing hopeful, idealistic notions that we find easy to dismiss. Rather like a short-lived youthful passion. And then they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable. At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed. We might be shocked into doing something ourselves. Who knows? I’ll keep hoping. I turned seventy this year. I won’t be here to see such a transformation if it comes. Perhaps you will.”

Surely it’s no crime
when justice is symmetry
to love a criminal?

“I should get to work,” he said. “The Fed is likely to raise its rate today. There’ll be fun and games on the exchange markets.”

Fun and games was not an expression that either of us ever used. As Adam came by us to go into the bedroom, he stopped. “I have a suggestion. We talked of going to Salisbury, then we held back. I think we should visit your father, and while we’re there we could drop in on Mr. Gorringe. Why wait for him to come here and frighten us? Let’s go and frighten him. Or at least talk to him.”

We looked at Miranda.

She thought for a moment. “All right.”

Adam said, “Good,” and went on his way, while I felt it right there in my chest, the cool clutch of a cliché: my heart sank.

We stopped and he looked steadily into my eyes. “I want justice.”

“Fine. But why do you want to put Miranda through this?”

“It’s a matter of symmetry.”

I said, “She’ll be in harm’s way. We all will. This man is violent. He’s a criminal.”

He smiled. “She is too.”

“A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. Out of nowhere. No history—not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

I made what I already knew was going to be my last appeal. “Please let’s remember Mariam. What Gorringe did to her, and where that led. Miranda had to lie to get justice. But truth isn’t always everything.”

Adam looked at me blankly. “That’s an extraordinary thing to say. Of course truth is everything.”

I bought him and he was mine to destroy. I hesitated fractionally. A half-second longer and he would have caught my arm, for as the hammer came down he was already beginning to turn. He may have caught my reflection in Miranda’s eyes. It was. Two-handed blow at full force to the top of his head. The sound was not of hard plastic cracking or of metal, but the muffled thud as of bone. Miranda let out a cry of horror, and stood.

Then the pale blue eyes with their tiny black rods turned milky green, his hands curled by jerks into fists, and with a smooth humming sound, he lowered his head onto the table.

In all our anguished conversations about Adam, his personality, his morals, his motives, we returned often to the moment I brought the hammer down on his head. For ease of reference, and to spare us too vivid a recall, we came to call it, “the deed.” […] The spirit of the deed took various forms. Its least frightening shape was that of a sensible, even heroic move to keep Miranda out of trouble and Mark in our lives. How were we to know that the material was already with the police?

“My hope is that one day, what you did to Adam with a hammer will constitute a serious crime. Was it because you paid for him? Was that your entitlement?”

But for the moment, I remained in the corridor, in a daze, sitting on a bench, staring through an open door opposite, trying to understand what it was, what it meant, to be accused of an attempted murder for which I would never stand trial.

Before us sat the ultimate plaything, the dream of ages, the triumph of humanism—or its angel of death.

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 displays 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.

I felt the need, rather childish, to demonstrate that I was in charge. I said, “Adam, will you walk round the table a couple of times? I want to see how you move.”

“Sure.”

There was nothing mechanical about his gait. In the confines of the room he managed a long stride. When he’d been round twice he stood by his chair, waiting.

Behind me, Adam was in place at the table, gazing towards the window. I finished and was drying my hands on a tea towel as I went over to him. Despite my sunny mood, I could not forgive his disloyalty. I didn’t want to hear what else he had to say. There were boundaries of ordinary decency he needed to learn—hardly a challenge for his neural networks. His heuristic shortcomings had encouraged my decision. When I had learned more, when Miranda had done her share, he could come back into our lives.

There are some decisions, even moral ones, that are formed in regions below conscious thought. I found myself jogging towards the playground’s fence, stepping over it, taking three paces and putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder.

Adam’s insights, even when valid, were socially inept.

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 then night air suddenly penetrated by Miranda’s extended ecstatic scream that tapered to a moan and then a stifled sob […] I duly laid on Adam the privilege and obligations of a conspecific. I hated him.

[Adam] was supposed to be my moral superior. I would never meet anyone better. Had he been my friend, he would have been guilty of a cruel and terrible lapse. The problem was that I had bought him, he was my expensive possession and it was not clear what his obligations to me were, beyond a vaguely assumed helpfulness. What does the slave owe to the owner? Also, Miranda did not “belong” to me. This was clear. I could hear her tell me that I had no good cause to feel betrayed.

“The issue isn’t Adam’s state of mind. It’s yours.”

“Listen,” I said. “If he looks and sounds and behaves like a person, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what he is. I made the same assumption about you. About everybody. We all do. You fucked him. I’m angry. I’m amazed you’re surprised. If that’s what you really are.”

Mark’s gaze never left Miranda’s face. He was entranced. Now she picked him up and cradled him as she danced around the room, singing “Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle.” I wondered if Adam had the capacity to understand the joy of dance, of movement for its own sake, and whether Miranda was showing him a line he couldn’t cross. If so, she may have been wrong. Adam could imitate and respond to emotions and appear to take pleasure in reasoning. He might also have known something of the purposeless beauty of art.

“Nearly everything I’ve read in the world’s literature describes varieties of human failure—of understanding, of reason, of wisdom, of proper sympathies. Failure 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. […] 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. […] 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 literatures will lose their unwholesome nourishment. The lapidary haiku, the still, clear perception and celebration of thigs as they are, will be the only necessary form.”

When Miranda had finished her story, there was the silence, and then we had talked. After a while, I had turned to Adam. “Well?”

He took a few seconds, then he had said, “Very dark.”

A rape, a suicide, a wrongly kept secret—of course it was dark. I was in an emotional state and I didn’t ask him to explain. Now, lying next to Miranda as she slept, I wondered if he meant something more significant, the consequence of this thinking, if that was really what it…depends on definitions…That was when I too fell asleep.

“But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends.”

“Then, it seems, they go through a stage of expressing hopeful, idealistic notions that we find easy to dismiss. Rather like a short-lived youthful passion. And then they set about learning the lessons of despair we can’t help teaching them. At worst, they suffer a form of existential pain that becomes unbearable. At best, they or their succeeding generations will be driven by their anguish and astonishment to hold up a mirror to us. In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed. We might be shocked into doing something ourselves. Who knows? I’ll keep hoping. I turned seventy this year. I won’t be here to see such a transformation if it comes. Perhaps you will.”

Surely it’s no crime
when justice is symmetry
to love a criminal?

“I should get to work,” he said. “The Fed is likely to raise its rate today. There’ll be fun and games on the exchange markets.”

Fun and games was not an expression that either of us ever used. As Adam came by us to go into the bedroom, he stopped. “I have a suggestion. We talked of going to Salisbury, then we held back. I think we should visit your father, and while we’re there we could drop in on Mr. Gorringe. Why wait for him to come here and frighten us? Let’s go and frighten him. Or at least talk to him.”

We looked at Miranda.

She thought for a moment. “All right.”

Adam said, “Good,” and went on his way, while I felt it right there in my chest, the cool clutch of a cliché: my heart sank.

We stopped and he looked steadily into my eyes. “I want justice.”

“Fine. But why do you want to put Miranda through this?”

“It’s a matter of symmetry.”

I said, “She’ll be in harm’s way. We all will. This man is violent. He’s a criminal.”

He smiled. “She is too.”

“A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. Out of nowhere. No history—not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

I made what I already knew was going to be my last appeal. “Please let’s remember Mariam. What Gorringe did to her, and where that led. Miranda had to lie to get justice. But truth isn’t always everything.”

Adam looked at me blankly. “That’s an extraordinary thing to say. Of course truth is everything.”

I bought him and he was mine to destroy. I hesitated fractionally. A half-second longer and he would have caught my arm, for as the hammer came down he was already beginning to turn. He may have caught my reflection in Miranda’s eyes. It was. Two-handed blow at full force to the top of his head. The sound was not of hard plastic cracking or of metal, but the muffled thud as of bone. Miranda let out a cry of horror, and stood.

Then the pale blue eyes with their tiny black rods turned milky green, his hands curled by jerks into fists, and with a smooth humming sound, he lowered his head onto the table.

In all our anguished conversations about Adam, his personality, his morals, his motives, we returned often to the moment I brought the hammer down on his head. For ease of reference, and to spare us too vivid a recall, we came to call it, “the deed.” […] The spirit of the deed took various forms. Its least frightening shape was that of a sensible, even heroic move to keep Miranda out of trouble and Mark in our lives. How were we to know that the material was already with the police?

“My hope is that one day, what you did to Adam with a hammer will constitute a serious crime. Was it because you paid for him? Was that your entitlement?”

But for the moment, I remained in the corridor, in a daze, sitting on a bench, staring through an open door opposite, trying to understand what it was, what it meant, to be accused of an attempted murder for which I would never stand trial.