Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.

Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.

I had a sense then of his loneliness, settling like a weight around his muscular shoulders. He had woken to find himself in a dingy kitchen, in London SW9 in the late twentieth century, without friends, without a past or any sense of his future. He truly was alone.

I wonder how much is the robot and how much us anthropomorphism. As an anthropologist the narrator would surely be aware of this tendency.

“The mounted horse did not kill athletics. We run for joy.”

We were simply the embodiment of a pattern in modern manners: acquaintance, followed by sex, then friendship, finally love. There was no good reason we should travel this conventional course at the same speed. Patience was all.

That was a bad idea, of the kind that comes in the small hours. Like all insomniac brooding, the essence was repetition.

“From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.”

“Our leaves are falling. Come spring we will renew, But you, alas, fall once.”