„I reached the Purple Door unnoticed and keyed in the code I’d observed twice already.“
The „portrait man“, Mr Capaldi, had asked Klara to fill in a questionnaire in a separate room, while he takes pictures of Josie. Klara is curious to see the unfinished portrait, and smuggles herself into the artist’s (or scientist’s, as he calls himself) studio, using a code she had observed Mr Capaldi keying in when first leading „mother“ and then „father“ into the studio (doubtful though she could actually register the code the second time, through „frosted glass“). – There is a lot of tension; strange that Klara’s visual field is not partioned by now… That happens a bit later (p.208), when Klara is informed by Capaldi and „mother“, why she is here, and why she has been acquired in the first place. What Klara discovers in the studio is a reproduction of Josie, destined to be an AF, and Klara is supposed to transmute herself in a Josie AF (once the very sick Josie is gone).
That’s the nightmare scenario – AF coming to replace a beloved human. This, indeed, would mean that there is nothing unique about us, nothing that cannot be imitated. Klara seems almost neutral about it – as if it were a somewhat complicated task set before her, something that would make Josie live on – the actual Josie, not her memory. To the reader (if I am to go by personal experience) it feels wrong through and through, and Capaldi’s motivation is highly suspect, but Klara’s naive acceptance of her role seems just as wrong, especially after her promise to Melania. On the other hand, Klara may no longer be reporting all her thoughts and intentions to us, just as she doesn’t report to Capaldi the discrepancies in Josie’s „model“ that she noticed earlier. She may have other plans, she may be practicing her version of deceit – leading the humans on, in order to protect Josie as long as she can (?), or to learn more about humans – observe them in more intimate way than any AF was able before her.
Interesting thought that Klara is (becoming) selective in what she reports. She is not simply mirroring what she experiences, she is filtering and interpreting information she shares (see the scene above in the car when travelling to the city with mother, Helen, Josie and Rick: she decides not to recount the humorous remark of Josie, she informs us that a humorous remark has been made). What agenda does she have? We know she is designed to be very perceptive and reflective. Are we reading a kind of diary she was programmed to write? To what purpose?
I would like to explore this further, but I’m not sure Ishiguro allows us to. It is much more possible in Machines Like Me – I am convinced by now that Adams and Eves were actually constructed to collect information about human experience which would later be decodable and reusable, not just to create better (more lifelike) machines, but to – possibly – manipulate the people without their knowledge. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but with the assassination in the 9th chapter it’s kind of difficult not to think of it. I guess we can come back to this issue at the end of the novel, to see if we can find some kind of purpose in Klara’s memories.