Turing Test

by E. M. Foner

  “It’s a good truck, but in five years it probably won’t be legal given the way things are going with self-driving cars,” he said philosophically. “I’ll be able to buy clothes there?”

  “Your employer will provide everything,” I told him again. “It’s a Sun Cathedral, one of the oldest cults in civilized space, and they take good care of their workers. If you want any of your things shipped to you from the apartment, just make a list and use the tab’s messenger function, but don’t expect a quick answer because it’s going the long way around. And put this over your ear,” I said, handing him a translating cuff. “It will take a bit of time to get used to, but there are already a couple dozen species working on this site, so technology is the order of the day for communication.”

  “Well, whatever is on the other side, it’s got to beat sitting on a barstool upstairs every night and wondering why all of your students and staff keep moving to Australia,” he said, rising to his feet and offering me another handshake. “I’ve had enough of this town and I guess you must have known that when you asked me here. I step through the picture and I’m there?”

  “Just like in Mary Poppins,” eBeth told him, a reference I wouldn’t have caught without my Internet connection, but Jason nodded his understanding.

  “You take care of yourself too, kid,” he told her. “I guess I understand about the coffee now.”

  “Show those aliens what a human craftsman can do,” she called after him as he stepped through the portal.

  “Happy trails,” I muttered, watching as the closest thing to a humanoid they had on the worksite hurried over to greet him. The ear-cuff translator must have performed satisfactorily, because Jason turned and flashed us a thumbs-up before following the alien.

  “I’m an artificial intelligence construct from another world,” eBeth intoned, trying to lower her voice to imitate me. “I can’t believe that’s the best line you’ve come up with in three years of doing this.”

  She had a point.

  Five

  “Your students stole the antennas off the WiFi router again,” I told Professor Nordgren. “I suspected that would be it so I brought extras, but next time I’ll have to charge you.”

  “I’m sorry for dragging you all the way out here for something I should have checked myself,” she apologized. “All the little lights are winking green, so I just assumed somebody had pulled out a cable in the wire closet again. You know you’re the only one who can figure those out.”

  “That’s why you really need to keep the wire closet door locked,” I told her. The local college I was visiting was known more for parties than for academics and the students were always sabotaging the equipment. I got a lot of business from them because the technical support department had been downsized to the point where only employees with seniority were left, meaning they were more comfortable with overhead projectors than wireless networking. “Besides, if the router loses its Internet connection, the LED on the end will turn yellow.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said, though given that we’d had the exact same conversation the previous semester, I had my doubts. “Students will be students. Something tells me that you were a troublemaker yourself at that age.”

  There she went again with that unexplainable human intuition. When I was a young AI, my mentor was always telling me that I was lucky not to get myself disassembled for spare code, though I suspect all mentors tell their charges similar stories. I did have a reputation for being reckless in my methodology, but research funding on Library was even harder to come by than at this bush league college.

  “Not me, I was an angel,” I lied earnestly.

  “I suppose that my students must need the antennas for something important or they wouldn’t keep taking them,” she mused. “Perhaps they’re building a scale model of some new phased array radio telescope and they want to surprise me.”

  I knew it was far more likely the students were using them for drink stirrers or Lincoln Logs, but I’ve learned that it’s better for everybody not to rob naïve humans of their misconceptions. Besides, it took a certain innocence for a scientist to volunteer so much of her time to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Not to put too fine a point on it, I knew something she didn’t know.

  “Have you picked up any interesting signals lately?” I inquired, referring to the Internet-based project of analyzing radio telescope data in which she was an avid participant.

  “Thank you for asking, Mark. My intern discovered some odd data in the last batch, but everybody else seems to think that it’s random noise. Would you like to take a look?” She led me over to a desktop computer, which along with the monitor, was fastened to the lab bench with heavy metal straps to prevent theft. A few clicks brought up a screen full of waveforms, and she scrolled rapidly through them. “There’s just something odd about it, as if somebody took an intelligible message and ran it through a poorly designed randomization filter.”

  If my eyes were real they would have popped out of my head. I was able to decode the message almost immediately because I recognized the filter she hypothesized about as a side effect of a Hanker defensive screen. It was a first line defense against coherent energy beam weapons, employing a mirror-like plasma that could be shaped into a parabolic dish to reflect incoming fire back on the source or scatter it into harmless noise. In the low microwave range, the results were almost predictable if you had enough experience with the technology, which oddly enough, I did. As soon as I decoded the leader as 1679, the product of the prime numbers 73 and 23, I recognized it as the Arecibo message, sent from the large radio telescope in Puerto Rico as a proof-of-concept back in 1974. This was bad, very bad.

  “I flunked math in high school,” I told her, while I quickly ran a series of simulations for a shielded ship that intentionally dropped into normal space to intercept a radio beam.

  The odds of a Hanker ship approaching Earth from the exact direction of the M13 star cluster that the Arecibo message had been directed towards was lower than nil. Somebody was playing cutesy games with the humans and they must have known about my team’s time schedule. The rules were very strict about interfering with other aliens attempting to establish relations with a planet under observation and I needed to come to a decision quickly.

  “You know,” I continued, “I’ve studied radio a bit as a hobby, and the shape of those waves reminds me of a science fiction story I read about time travel. I can’t remember the title, but a show from the 1930’s suddenly started playing over everybody’s radios almost a hundred years later.”

  “Was this a comic book?” she asked.

  “Maybe, but in the story, scientists figured out that something almost fifty light years away had reflected the signals back on the source, and some genius even realized that it must have been the shaped energy screen of an approaching spaceship.”

  “So what did Superman do?”

  “No, listen, I’m serious. All of the major powers started making plans to send a probe to meet the approaching ship, but within a few weeks of the radio show playing, the aliens had already arrived. You see, the original transmission had obeyed the local laws of physics and the reflection had taken place almost fifty years earlier in that reference frame, but the ship had been jumping through, er, hyperspace, and was already on its final approach to Earth.”

  “Where they proceeded to enslave our people and steal all of our resources.”

  “Something like that,” I said, since it seemed to me that’s how most human science fiction was written.

  “A ship traveling faster than light and beating a reflected signal back to Earth is a form of time travel, a paradox,” she said dismissively. “Speaking of which, sometimes I can’t help wondering if Fermi was right.”

  “The Fermi Paradox? It’s so full of assumptions about alien intentions that it’s not worth mentioning. Besides, what are a few decades in the life of the universe? You’ve barely even started the search.”

  “There’s
that, too,” she admitted. “When I first got involved in the search for extraterrestrials, I didn’t really take into account that alien civilizations would progress through technological phases, just as we do ourselves. In less than a century we’ve gone from building ever more powerful radios for communications to sending pulses of light over fiber optic cables, and WiFi,” she gestured in the direction of the lab router, “so weak that even with the antennas, you lose the signal halfway down the hall. What are the odds that an advanced civilization out there is wasting terawatts of energy to beam a signal directly at our solar system when they don’t even know we’re here?”

  “Maybe aliens visited your world a long time ago and have been keeping an eye on it, waiting for you to develop to the point that you can hear and decipher an incoming message.”

  “My world?” she asked, lifting an eyebrow. Absent-minded as Professor Nordgren could be, she was still the smartest human in the room.

  “Our world,” I said, passing the verbal slip off with a chuckle. “Anyway, didn’t you say you have an old classmate at MIT who specializes in black holes and gravitational time dilation? I bet if you send him the data and mention that you think it might be an old signal from Earth being reflected back in scrambled form by an artificial energy field, he’ll get more out of it than either of us do.”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “You seem pretty familiar with the terminology for somebody who flunked high school math.” Her smartwatch buzzed, and then announced in a tinny voice, “Thursday morning departmental meeting.”

  “I guess that’s you,” I said, welcoming the opportunity to dodge further questions. “I put a bit of conductive glue on the antenna connector threads so they won’t be so easy to steal, but it may just lead to the kids taking the whole router next time. And don’t forget to contact your MIT friend.”

  “I miss the old days when I could claim to forget these meetings,” the professor lamented. “I’d accidentally break the watch but I know that the dean would just buy me another one.” She paused, took out her smartphone, and opened the e-mail app. “I imagine that David will just laugh at me, but sending him a long message under the table will give me something to do while the chairman drones on. You can’t even catch anybody’s eye in these meetings for all of the lap-texting going on.”

  “Good luck,” I said sympathetically as she hurried off to what promised to be an excruciatingly boring hour of being solicited for opinions that would certainly be ignored. I decided to call an emergency meeting to get my team up to speed on the Hanker situation. I linked to my own smartphone without taking it out of my pocket, and I began sending texts with the coded message even as I set off for Helen’s location.

  My team members and I all have integrated transponders that give our locations to the nearest micrometer. The technology is part of the basic survival package which is designed for contacting civilizations that may be far more advanced than humans, and therefore more likely to detect the presence of Observers. The precise location can be used to establish a temporary rescue portal should the situation require. Portal system theory is above my pay scale, but someday I hope to have enough credit at Library to borrow an introductory text on the subject.

  I found Helen in one of the break rooms, which was dominated by a high definition large-screen display showing medieval warriors fighting against a large troll in what appeared to be a dungeon littered with the corpses of fallen monsters. She was wedged between two young men on an undersized couch, but all three of them were seemingly unaware of each other as their thumbs worked overtime on the wireless game controllers.

  Just as soon as we kill this last one we’re switching to player-vs-player, Helen informed me over the secure link. I’m an assassin and I spent all night leveling up this character so it won’t take long.

  The troll fell to his knees and tried to swing his giant club one last time, then he expired, hit points exhausted.

  “PvP,” one of the young men shouted, but before his on-screen character could free its sword from the troll’s corpse, a little box reading ‘backstab’ appeared above his head and he collapsed in a heap.

  The other warrior faced off against Helen, while the young man pressed up against her left side on the couch complained, “No teleporting. It’s like a campus rule.”

  “Not where I come from,” she replied, and her character suddenly appeared behind the second warrior and drove in the dagger.

  “Arghh,” the young man groaned as his character was slain by the backstab. “What level are you, anyway?”

  “Thirty-two,” Helen said, lowering her controller. “Pay up.”

  Each of the young men extracted their wallets and handed over a five-dollar bill.

  “You’re pretty good for a girl,” one of them told her.

  “I’m plain pretty good,” she retorted. “I’ll be around if you want a rematch.”

  “We got class but we’ll be back at lunch,” the other student told her. “What’s your major, anyway?”

  “Gaming,” she replied with a seductive smile.

  The young men were elbowing each other so hard on the way out that I was sure that it would end in a cracked rib. I heard one bragging to the other, “Dude. She’s totally into me. That’s why she killed me second.”

  “So what’s up, Uncle Mark?” Helen asked when the room was empty of humans.

  “A great deal, unfortunately. How are you settling in?”

  “College is the best,” she declared enthusiastically. “My new roommates in the off-campus apartment I found are the coolest, and they’re throwing a big party tonight to celebrate my moving in.”

  “On a Thursday night? It couldn’t wait another 24 hours? I’m having everybody over for dinner,” I added, the verbal code phrase for an emergency meeting at my place.

  “I heard you the first time,” she said, referring to my text. “Friday night is their regular party and they wanted to do something special for me. Besides, it doesn’t start until after ten, and you said dinner like six-something.”

  “Six o’clock on the nose. Did you have any trouble signing up for classes?”

  “I just added myself,” Helen said, looking a bit puzzled. “They do everything on computers, you know.”

  I bit back an admonition about hacking and not taking unnecessary risks of exposure. “You don’t have any classes this morning?”

  “Sure. I had Physics II last period and Chemistry II starts in—right about now. They accepted all of my transfer credits from the University of Sydney without a hitch. You know, my roommates think that Australia is a state somewhere between Hawaii and California. I’m supposed to be a brainiac because of the courses I’m taking.”

  “Why aren’t you in Chemistry now?”

  “Because I know it already,” she said, sounding exasperated. “Do you think I’m going to waste four hours a day sitting in classes?”

  “You’ll fail out,” I warned her, though I have to admit that she was doing a good job passing as a nineteen-year-old human. “They take attendance.”

  “Which gets recorded on computers,” she said, slower and louder this time, as if I were an elderly human with hearing loss. “Ooh, fresh meat.”

  A young guy entered the lounge and appeared captivated by the final scene from the battle, which was still frozen on the large screen. “Where’s that from?” he asked.

  “It’s a training scenario from Dungeon Maker—a friend of mine hooked me up with it. It takes less than an hour so it’s perfect for school. Wanna play?” She patted the couch next to her.

  “Uh, yeah,” the guy said. “The troll is the boss?”

  “Boss assignment is random since it’s for practice. We start as a team to wipe out the mobs, and when the last one falls, it shifts to PVP.”

  “Awesome. Do we start at the same level?”

  “I’m Helen,” she said, offering him a hand, and then holding onto his longer than necessary. A goofy grin spread across his face and he forgot to follow up
on his question.

  “Derrick.”

  “Want to play for five?”

  “That’s cool. Is the old dude your dad or something?”

  “Uncle,” Helen replied. “He works in town and he was just leaving.”

  Six

  “You can’t stay,” I told eBeth when I arrived home. “I have some friends coming over.”

  “Your team? You never invite them here.”

  “It’s a bit of an emergency.”

  “Are you letting Spot stay?”

  “He lives here.”

  “Then I’m staying too,” she stated with finality and went back to her game.

  I considered bribing her to leave, but that can get expensive in a hurry, and I don’t like the idea of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Besides, with the exception of Helen, eBeth had already met all of my team. I gave in.

  “The new team member is coming so don’t be surprised.”

  “Helen? She’s cool.”

  “How do you know about her?”

  “We ran into each other at Sue’s apartment yesterday when I went to check in on the cats. Helen was there to pick up Sue’s spare futon so her roommates don’t think she sleeps on a bare floor.”

  “And she told you she was on my team?” I asked.

  “Well, duh. Who else would be in Sue’s place? We played a couple of games and I sent her a copy of the Dungeon Maker intro I hacked to add PVP. She was going to try hustling some students with it.”

  “She succeeded. And don’t forget to eat dinner.”

  “Sue’s bringing the pizza. She called ahead.”

  Spot licked his nose at the mention of pizza and whacked his tail on the couch a few times. Sometimes I had to wonder if his affection for me was based entirely on the fact that my team members and I were always buying food for the sake of appearances.

  “I don’t suppose you went to school today.”

  “I thought we settled that already.”