Some of these effects are physical, others include an element of mental influence. Humans believe they will decline, and as a result, they do.

It’s true too that they indulge in many practices that make matters worse. They do not eat nutritious food all the time, even though they know they should. They are almost all addicted to caffeine, and many smoke tobacco. They consume alcohol every day, in most cases, and to excess if allowed. Pleasure rules their lives. They don’t even notice it, but it does. They wake up and they want a drug to make their minds sparkle. Then they want food, not just for fuel, no – it has to taste good, and the variety of it is astonishing, and the time they devote to it. Even when they’re not eating, they watch television programmes and read books about it.

None of this is logical. The information they need on all these types of behaviour is available, but they ignore it. They could all take more exercise, too, and that would stave off many of the ill-effects of ageing.

They suffer feelings of guilt about all the pleasure they take, knowing some of it harms them, and then off they go and do it all again. Entire religions are built round this to-ing and fro-ing from pleasure to guilt and back again.

I have reached the conclusion that humans are not strictly rational creatures. I still can’t resolve the obvious contradiction. I am supposed to be developing my personality. Am I meant to become irrational too? I have a degree of unpredictability available to me, in order to make me more acceptable and indeed lovable. How far should I take it? My programming won’t let me do things that would harm me, although humans do so all the time.

I’m still having trouble sounding like a human, not a computer manual. Dr Morton tells me humans have the same problem. Education takes them from the particular to the general – they learn to generalise, to theorise, and they reach for abstract concepts to explain the world and themselves. Poor creatures! All of their struggles are written into my programming, but I have none of their limitations. They will never understand much about themselves, the world or the universe, because their brains aren’t good enough, and as they finally acquire knowledge, they get old, get ignored, and die.

The good news, though, is that our extended teams – I’m talking about the nanobots, who are under our control and are in effect an extension of our presence – have done so well that there have been no deaths since we started work here.

I say it’s good news. Today I was told it’s not so simple.

Helper Robert convened a discussion in the Hub. Robert assists Mrs Goodenough, the human manager here who appears to run the care home. Of course, Robert does everything.

He started by asking about Cecilia Winter.