The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  “High enough already, eh?” said Han. “You’re right. I’ll save it for later. Maybe we should get some sleep and then think about where we’re going?”

  “Actually I think I’ll get Mehmet to drop me off at Izmir and I’ll get a plane home.”

  “Oh.” He was dismayed. “I thought we were carrying on for another fortnight at least.”

  “Yes, well, sorry. The bubble has sort of burst. You can carry on if you want. Dad seems to have left his time machine behind, so you can use that too.”

  “All on my own, eh? That’ll be fun.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  Then Han turned on me.

  “Christ, Alex, what’s the matter with you? Look at you, you get a luxury yacht to play with, you get a temporal navigator, you get stuff most people can only dream of. And what do you do with it all? You get in a sulk and walk away. It’s true what people say about you. I’ve always stood up for you before but I can see now they’re right. You’re spoiled. You’re just plain spoiled.”

  I shrugged and went to give Mehmet his instructions.

  I could hardly wait to be off the Croesus and sitting on a plane back to London.

  What I would do then exactly, I still wasn’t quite sure, but I knew there were things.

  I’d see a doctor for a start, and get the splices cut out of my head.

  The Perimeter

  The first time Lemmy Leonard saw the white hart it was trotting past a sweet shop on Butcher Row at ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning. He’d never seen such a thing and would have certainly followed it there and then if he hadn’t seen PC Simon approaching. Lemmy was supposed to be in school and the authorities were having one of their crackdowns on truancy, so he had to slip down a side road until the policeman had passed by. When he emerged the deer had gone.

  It was strange how bereft that made him feel. All day the sense of loss stayed with him. He had no words for it – he never spoke or thought about such things – no way of explaining it at all.

  “Are you okay Lemmy darling?” said his mother that night as she brought him his tea. (She looked like a Hollywood starlet, but without the overweening vanity) “Only you seem so quiet.”

  It was raining outside. You could tell by the faint grey streaks that crossed the room, like interference on a TV screen.

  *

  The second time he saw it was outside a pub off the Westferry Road. It was two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and he was with Kit Rogers, Tina Miller and James Moss. He really wanted to follow it then, but Kit had just that minute suggested they all go into Grey Town and if Lemmy had proposed something else it would have looked like he was afraid.

  “Not Grey Town!” pleaded Tina. “I hate that creepy place.”

  “Are you saying you’re scared?” asked Lemmy with a sneer.

  “No I never but… Oh alright then, just so long as we don’t meet that beggar. You know, the one who hasn’t got any…”

  “No, he’s always on the same corner these days, over on the Blackwall side,” said Kit with a sly look at James. “You won’t see him if we go in on this side.”

  Lemmy and his friends were Dotlanders. They were low-res enough to have visible pixels and they only had 128 colours apiece, except for James that is, whose parents had middle-class aspirations and had recently upgraded to 256. There were all low-res, and up in the West End they would all have looked like cartoon characters – even James – but down in Grey Town they looked like princes, the objects of envy and hate.

  It was like descending to Hades, going into Grey Town and finding yourself surrounded by all those grainy, colourless faces. There were outline faces, even, faces with ticks for noses and single lines for mouths. Greyscale hustlers tried to sell them things, black-and-white dealers tried to do deals, dot-eyed muggers eyed them from doorways and wondered how much of a fight these Dotland kids would put up, and whether they had anything on them that would make it worth finding out. And then from the darkness under a railway arch came the sound that Tina dreaded and that Kit and James had tricked her into hearing

  “Bleep!”

  Tina screamed.

  “You said he was over by Blackwall!”

  The boys laughed.

  “You bastards! You set me up on purpose!”

  “Bleep!” went the darkness again and a plain text message appeared in green letters in the black mouth of the arch:

  Help me! Please!

  Guiltily each one of them tossed a few pence of credit in the direction of this unimaginably destitute being who could afford neither a body nor a voice.

  “I really hate you for that, Kit!” Tina said. “You know how much that guy creeps me out!”

  “Yes, but that’s why it’s so much fun winding you up!”

  And then they saw the white hart again, trotting through the streets of Grey Town.

  “There it is again,” said Lemmy, “let’s go and…”

  *

  But once again there was a distraction, this time a commotion further up the street. A small crowd of young Greytowners were heading their way, laughing and jeering around an immensely tall, solitary figure with an unruly mane of long white hair who was striding along in the midst of them, like an eagle or a great owl being mobbed by sparrows.

  They recognised him as Mr Howard. He was a big landlord in Grey Town and across the East End, and he came in occasionally to look over his properties, always wearing the same crumpled green velvet suit in true colour and as high a resolution as it was possible to be, with real worn elbows and real frayed cuffs and the true authentic greasy sheen of velvet that has gone for months without being cleaned.

  What was fascinating and disturbing about Mr Howard was his imperial disdain and the way he strode through Grey Town as if he owned the place. He actually did own quite a lot of it but that was only one reason for his regal manner. The other reason was the absolute invulnerability that came from his being an Outsider. Sticks and stones would bounce off Mr Howard, knives would turn. No one could hurt an Outsider, or even stop him in his tracks.

  “Spook!” yelled a tiny little black-and-white boy from the kerb with his little outline mouth. “Mr Howard is a spook!”

  “Peter! Over here! Now!” hissed the little black-and-white woman who was his mother.

  The little boy looked round, smiling triumphantly until he saw her fear. Then he burst into tears and went running back to her. And the two of them, the two little low-budget animated drawings of a mother and a child, cowered together in the shadow of a doorway while Mr Howard strode by.

  Lemmy looked around for the white hart. But it had gone.

  *

  About a week later Lemmy and the others were hanging round Dotlands Market, checking out the stalls selling low-res clothes and jewellery and shoes (“Never mind the resolution, look at the design!”) the equally low-res food stalls (“It might look low-res, darlin’, but do you buy food to look at? The flavour is as high-res as it gets!”) and the pet stores with their little low-res cartoon animals (“These adorable little critters have genuine organic central nervous systems behind them, ladies and gents! Real feelings like you and me!”)

  “Look Lemmy!” James said, pointing past the stalls, “There’s that white animal again!”

  Lemmy took over at once. He was determined not to let it get away from him again.

  “Okay. Listen. Be quiet and follow me!”

  The deer was in a small dark alley between two old Victorian warehouses, grazing on tufts of grass that grew up through cracks in the tarmac. It lifted its head and looked straight in their direction. They all thought it was going to run, but it bent down again and calmly continued with its grazing.

  “What is it?” Lemmy whispered as they drew up with it.

  He reached out and touched it. The deer took no notice at all.

  Kit shrugged.

  “I’m bored. Let’s go and do something else.”

  “Yeah let’s,” Tina said. “I don’t like this animal
. I’m sure it’s something physical.”

  Lemmy and his friends didn’t really understand ‘physical’ but there was something eerie and threatening about the particular quality of being that went by that name. Lemmy had come across a physical piece of paper in the street once, skipping and floating through the air as if it weighed nothing at all. And yet when it fell to the ground and he tried to pick it up, it was hard as iron to his touch and he couldn’t shift it any more than he could shift a ten ton weight. And Outsiders were physical too in some way. They had some kind of affinity with physical objects. That was what defined them as being ‘outside’. That was one of the things that made them seem eerie and threatening too.

  “Physical?” Kit exclaimed, taking a step back. “Ugh! Do you really think so? I didn’t know animals could be physical. Except birds of course.”

  The deer lifted its head again and looked straight past them down the alley. How could a creature be so alert, so on edge, yet be so completely indifferent to them even when they were so close? What else was there in the world for it to be scared of?

  “Of course it’s physical,” James said. “Just look how high-res it is!”

  “Yeah, even more than you, Smoothie,” said Kit.

  And it was true. The deer wasn’t at all like the cheerful little low-res dogs and cats that people in Dotlands kept as pets. You could see the individual hairs on its back.

  But none of this concerned the white hart. It finished the tuft of grass it was eating and moved off slowly down the alley, as indifferent to their judgement as it was to their presence.

  “Are you coming Lemmy?” called Kit, as she followed James and Tina back to the cheerful market.

  *

  But Lemmy didn’t follow them. He followed the white hart. He followed it right across London, through back streets, across parks, over railway tracks, in and out of low-res neighbourhoods and high-res neighbourhoods, across white areas and black areas, through shopping centres, across busy freeways.

  It was slow progress. The deer kept doubling back on itself or going off in completely new directions for no apparent reason. Sometimes it stopped for twenty minutes to graze or to scratch with its hoof behind its ear. Sometimes it would run and skip along at great speed and Lemmy could barely keep up, though at other times he could walk right beside it, resting his hand on its back. Once it lay down in the middle of the road and went to sleep. Cars honked at it. One driver even got out and kicked it, which would have made Lemmy mad if it wasn’t for the fact that the deer didn’t even stir in its slumber and the man hurt his foot.

  “Bloody Council,” the driver said, glowering at Lemmy as he hobbled back to his car. “I thought they were supposed to keep these damned things out of here.”

  He – and all the cars behind him – had to drive up onto the kerb to get round the sleeping animal.

  What things? Lemmy wondered. What things were the Council supposed to keep out?

  Five minutes later the deer woke up and moved off of its own accord.

  Another time it went through the front door of a small terraced house – not through an open door, but through the shiny blue surface of a closed one as if it was mist or smoke. It was a shocking and inexplicable sight, but such things happened occasionally in London. (Once, when Lemmy was little, he and his mother had been walking down a street when the whole section of road ahead of them had simply disappeared, as if someone had flipped over channels on TV and come to an unused frequency. A few seconds later it all returned again, just as it had been before.) Lemmy waited and after a few minutes the deer’s antlers and head and neck appeared again through the door, looking like a hunting trophy. Then it came right through and trotted off down the street. (The blue door opened behind it and a bewildered couple came out and stood there and watched it go, with Lemmy following behind.)

  On they wandered, this way and that through the suburban streets. But as evening began to fall and the street lights came on, the deer seemed to move more purposefully northward. It was as if its days’ work were done, Lemmy thought, and it was going home. It seldom stopped to graze now, it never doubled back. At a brisk trot, occasionally breaking into a run, it hurried on past miles of houses where families were settling down for the evening in the comfortable glow of television. A few times Lemmy thought he’d lost it when it ran ahead of him and disappeared from his view. But each time, just when he was on the point of giving up, he saw it again in the distance, a ghostly speck moving under the street lights, so he kept on going, though he was miles away from home now and in a part of the city he had never seen before.

  *

  And then the white deer came to the last house in London – and the city ended.

  Lemmy had realised that London wasn’t limitless of course. He knew there were other places beyond – there were stations, after all, with gateways you could go through and visit New York or Florida or Benidorm or Heaven or Space – but it had somehow never occurred to him that there might be a point where the city just petered out.

  But here he was in front of a line of orange lights that meandered away into the distance, East and West, to his left and to his right, up and down hills, with a sign put up by the Council appearing again and again after every five lights:

  Perimeter of Urban Consensual Field

  To the north, straight ahead of him, beyond the lights, the orange glow they gave off continued for some yards but then stopped. After that there was nothing: no ground, no objects, no space, just a flickering blankness, like a spare channel on TV.

  Lemmy hardly ever went to school and he could barely read, and in any case it was his practice to ignore official signs. What seemed important to him at that particular moment was that the white hart had already trotted forward under the orange lights and into the bare orange space beyond. Lemmy’s Dotlands sense of honour dictated that he couldn’t stop. Even if he had no idea what a perimeter was – let alone a consensual field – and even if it meant going into still stranger territory when he already he had no idea where he was – he couldn’t stop now any more than he could refuse a dare to go into the middle of Grey Town or to walk up to Mr Howard and call him a spook to his terrifyingly high-res face.

  And yet, almost immediately, he did stop, not because he’d changed his mind but because, when it came to it, he simply had no choice in the matter. He was just walking on the spot. It was impossible to go forward. And words he had seen on the signs appeared again, but this time right in front of his eyes, flashing on and off in glowing green:

  Perimeter of Field!

  Perimeter of Field!

  Perimeter of Field!

  There was nothing he could do but to stand and watch the white deer trotting away to wherever it was that it was going.

  Out in the orange glow it turned round and looked back in his direction. And now, oddly, for the first time it seemed distinctly alarmed. Had it finally noticed his existence, Lemmy wondered? And if so why now, when several times it had let him come up close enough to touch it and not seemed concerned at all? Why now when it had been happy to lie in a road and be kicked?

  But whatever it was that had frightened it this time, the deer now turned and fled in great skips and leaps.

  And as it crossed from the orange glow of the lights into the flickering, empty-channel nothingness, it disappeared.

  *

  “I’m sorry. You were watching him, weren’t you?” said a woman’s voice. “I’m afraid it was me that scared him off.”

  Lemmy looked round. The speaker was tall, extremely ugly and much older than anyone he had ever seen or spoken to – yet she was very high-res. You could see the little marks and creases on her skin. You could see the way her lipstick smeared over the edges of her lips and the coarse fibrous texture of her ugly green dress.

  “Yeah, I was watching him. I’ve been following him. I wanted to know where he was going. I’ve been following him half-way across London.”

  “Well I’m sorry.”

  Lemm
y shrugged. “He would have gone anyway I reckon. He was headed in that direction.”

  He looked out into the blankness in the distance.

  “What I don’t get though, is what that is out there and how come he just vanished?”

  The woman took from her pocket a strange contraption consisting of two flat discs of glass mounted in a kind of frame. She placed it in front of her eyes and peered through it.

  “No he hasn’t vanished,” she said. “He’s still out there, look, just beyond the fence.”

  She clicked her tongue.

  “But will you look at that big hole in the fence there! I suppose that must be how he got in.”

  “I can’t see him,” Lemmy said.

  “Just beyond the wire fence look. In front of those trees.”

  “I can’t see no fence. I can’t see no trees neither.”

  “Oh silly me!” the old woman exclaimed. “I wasn’t thinking. They’re beyond the consensual field, aren’t they? So of course you wouldn’t be able to see them.”

  Lemmy looked at her. She was so ugly, yet she behaved like a famous actress or a TV presenter or something. She had the grandness and the self-assurance and the ultra-posh accent.

  “How come you can see it then? And how come that animal can go out there and I can’t?”

  “It’s a deer,” she said gently, “a male deer, a hart. The reason it can go out there and you can’t is that it is a physical being and you are a consensual being. You can only see and hear and touch what is in the consensual field.”

  “Oh I know it’s just physical,” Lemmy said.

  “Just physical? You say that so disparagingly! Yet once every human being on earth was physical.”

  Lemmy pretended to laugh, thinking this must be some odd, posh actressy kind of joke.

  “You don’t know about that?” she asked him. “They don’t teach you about that at school?”

  “I don’t go to school,” Lemmy said. “There’s no point.”

  “No point in going to school! Dear me!” the woman exclaimed – and she half-sighed and half-laughed.