While his batteries began to charge, I made us coffee then scrolled through the 470-page online handbook. 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. At a careless glance, I might have taken my Adam for a Turk or a Greek. By the end of the first week, all the Eves sold out. Random programming as well as life experience would grant to all complete latitude in sexual preference.
There were rumours, then complaints, that the Arab could not be told apart from the Jew. Notions of biological race being scientifically discredited, the twenty-five were designed to cover a range of ethnicities. Twelve of this first edition were called Adam, thirteen were called Eve. He probably wanted to have his lab take it apart to examine its workings fully. 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. I brought him home in a hired van to my unpleasant flat in north Clapham.
The first truly viable manufactured human with plausible intelligence and looks, believable motion and shifts of expression went on sale the week before the Falklands Task Force set off on its hopeless mission. 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 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. And I was there as a young man, an early and eager adopter in that chilly dawn.īut artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived, so when they did, they seemed to some a disappointment. 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. 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 loftiest terms, we aimed to escape our mortality, confront or even replace the Godhead with a perfect self. As soon as it was feasible, we had no choice but to follow our desires and hang the consequences. Our ambitions ran high and low – for a creation myth made real, for a monstrous act of self-love. It was religious yearning granted hope, it was the holy grail of science.
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