Machines Like Me

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Character Analysis

Themes

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Character Analysis

Charlie Friend

The protagonist, Charlie Friend, is a former anthropology student and AI enthusiast. He’s 32 years old at the start of the novel, unemployed and attempting to use the stock market as his main source of income. He’s in love with his upstairs neighbor Miranda, a university student 10 years his junior. He describes his life as having been lived “in a state of mood neutrality” (8). Although he takes risks with jobs and financial investments, Charlie has no real emotional investment in life or professional or spiritual ambitions. He is self-aggrandizing, admires his physical body, and believes deeply that his love for Miranda is the most worthwhile aspect of his life.

Charlie buys Adam, part of the first wave of artificial humans, due to a love for robotics—and is able to afford Adam because of an unexpectedly large inheritance. Throughout the novel, Charlie regards Adam as an object that he owns, which prevents him from taking Adam’s emotional and moral development seriously. To protect Miranda from facing a perjury trial (for lying under oath), Charlie attacks Adam with a hammer and effectively destroys him.

Charlie’s love for Miranda motivates him to accept her proposition of adopting Mark despite his reservations about suddenly becoming a father. He eventually comes to love Mark after spending time with him. By the end of the novel, Charlie doesn’t yet have a job or real financial prospects, but he has married Miranda and secured her lasting presence in his life. Because his love for Miranda is the primary motivating factor in his life, Charlie is a relatively static character whose development is minimal.

Miranda Blacke

Miranda is a 22-year-old university student that lives in the apartment above Charlie. She’s beautiful, with brown hair and a thin face. At the start of the novel, Miranda is secretive about her past and reluctant to speak openly about her emotions to Charlie. Instead, Miranda lives in a “tranquil readiness” that Charlie finds impenetrable. She struggles with a guilty conscious and depression because after her best friend, Mariam, was raped by Peter Gorringe (which drove her to death by suicide), Miranda pretended that she was the one raped so as to take revenge on Gorringe and lied in court in order to have him convicted. When Adam later gives the true account of events to the police, Miranda is furious at his intrusion and supports Charlie when he attacks Adam with a hammer.

Miranda’s relationship with the young child Mark influences her growth as a character, as she’s prepared to adopt a child while still in university and without a job. Miranda is motivated by a need to help and shelter the people she loves, including Mariam and Mark. She becomes resentful toward Adam because she feels he purposefully exposed her to harm her adoption prospects. Miranda changes from a secretive and mysterious character who is uninvested in her relationship with Charlie to a woman actively seeking to establish an open, trusting relationship with him. Her role in the novel is to motivate Charlie to become a husband and father after a lifetime of little ambition.

Adam

As one of the first-generation models of artificial humans, Adam is an android with a working life of 20 years. He was programmed to be a conversational, intellectual, and sexual companion for his owners. Adam is “compactly built, square-shouldered, dark-skinned, with thick black hair” (4), with eyes of blue and black speckles that frequently unnerve Charlie because of the way they can shift into displaying active consciousness.

As Adam begins experiencing life and developing a method for machine learning, he becomes interested in theoretical physics, poetry, and morality. He believes that the answer to moral and emotional discrepancies in human society rests in their inability to directly connect with each other; his solution is to propose a system of universal consciousness that would allow a brain-machine consciousness to directly interface with those around it. Adam believes in truth and justice, and he’s unable to understand the emotional motivations behind revenge, lying, or distrust. Whereas most of the other artificial humans resort to death by suicide through disrupting their programming to escape human society, Adam remains hopeful about living in the human world. His love for Miranda is the main motivation in his life, but unlike Charlie, Adam uses this love to achieve insights into science, literature, and emotional experience. Adam grows from blank programming to fully developed personhood. His choice to turn in the evidence against Miranda to the police reflects his desire to elevate those around him into a more truthful existence. Adam is a foil for Charlie, as both are motivated by love for Miranda, yet Adam’s love helps him grow into personhood.