The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  Victor smiles politely, cutting into his pork chop. Synthetiks first emerged from the laboratory a couple of years previously, and they are still banned in the UK, though the ban is currently being challenged in the European Court. As a computer scientist he rather scorns the publicity given to the semi-human, semi-molluscan flesh. Simulated human tissue is yesterday’s technology. The real technical achievement about synthetics, the true master-stroke, is the brilliant programming which allow them to faithfully mimic the movements of the human body and face.

  But perhaps you have to be a computer man to understand just how very clever that is.

  “You English are wise to ban them of course,” mutters the German philosopher, turning back to attend to his food. “What I said earlier was true but completely beside the point. The attraction between real human beings may well often begin as a physical matter, but that is the mere starting point, the foundation on which the whole magnificent edifice of sexual love is built. But a synthetik is a starting point for nothing, the foundation of nothing.”

  Victor doesn’t enjoy conversation with strangers. But, seeing that conversation of some sort seems inevitable, he changes the subject.

  “You were saying you have made a study of the Cassiopeians,” he says. “I must admit I don’t know much about them. I rather lost track after the news first broke, and those pictures came out. Tell me about trialism.”

  “You don’t know much about them?! How can any educated...” Gruber makes a gesture of exasperation. “Well, I suppose I can’t accuse you of being unusual in that respect! But it never ceases to amaze me that five years after the most astounding event in human history, hardly anyone seems to give it a moment’s thought. Would you believe, the research money for textual analysis is actually drying up now, though the message is still coming through as clear as ever from the sky!”

  Victor feels a little ashamed. “Well, I suppose it is rather appalling when you put it like that! I guess it was when we all realised that the source was 200 light-years away and there was no possibility at all of a dialogue or physical contact. And then it came out that it was all rather obscure philosophical ramblings and nothing that we could really use...I suppose it just became another one of those amazing things that we get used to: like cities on the moon or... or robot air hostesses with human flesh!”

  The German snorts. “No doubt. But really is there any comparison between these little technological tricks that you mention and the discovery of other thinking minds among the stars?”

  He rolls his eyes upward. “But then, no one is interested in thinking any more. You are quite right: when governments and corporations discovered that it was philosophy the Cassiopeians were sending out, that really was the last straw. They’d hoped for new technologies, new sciences, new powers over the physical world... But philosophy!”

  He sighs extravagantly. “In answer to your question about trialism. The Cassiopeians organize the world in threes. They have three sexes, three states of matter, three dimensions of space, three modes of being... and above all, three great forces, struggling for dominance in the world: Valour, Gentleness and Evil.”

  “Not Good and Evil?”

  “No, no, no. They have no concept of ‘Good.’ It would seem quite incomprehensible to them that we could compound two such obviously unmixable essences as Valour and Gentleness into a single word. To the Cassiopeians, all three forces are equally incompatible. Gentleness tells us to do one thing, Evil tells us to do another, and Valour – it tells us to do another thing again.”

  Victor smiles, with dry, polite scepticism. “I hadn’t realised that the translation had got to this stage. I thought I read somewhere there was still a lot of controversy about the text.”

  The German growls darkly: “ Ja, ja, ja, a lot of controversy...”

  *

  As they separate in the airport, Gruber presses a card into Victor’s hand. “Come and see me if you have the time. It is not every day after all that you will meet a naturalised Cassiopeian!”

  His eyebrows bristle as he glares around at silvery robot security guards, robot porters, male and female synthetiks with bright smiles manning the airline check-in desks. “In fact, even a genuine human being is becoming something of a rarity!”

  Victor says something insincere, but he is no longer paying attention to the peculiar old man. He has spotted his German friends, Franz and Renate.

  “Victor, how nice to see you! How are you? How is Lizzie? How is Cambridge?”

  They are bright, polite, smartly dressed young people, who Victor and Lizzie met when they spent a year in Cambridge. After the eccentric Gruber, who might at any time say something embarrassing, they seem very normal and unthreatening and easy to get along with. Victor shakes their hands and exchanges minor news. They take him out to their little electric car (fossil fuels are verboten in the new Green Berlin) and head off in the direction of their Schoneberg apartment where he is to stay till he has found accommodation of his own.

  “But I’ve forgotten if you’ve ever been here before?” says Franz.

  “Strangely enough no. Very provincial of me, I know, not to have visited the capital of Europa!”

  The two Germans laugh, pleased.

  “Come now Victor,” says Renate, “surely even an Englishman knows that the capital of Europa is Brussels!”

  “Well you know what they say: the President of the Commission sits in Brussels but when he puts in a claim for expenses it’s Chancellor Kommler who signs the form.”

  The Germans smile. These bantering exchanges, with their little hidden barbs of jealousy, are the bread-and-butter of contacts between young Euro-professionals all over the continent, as they shake down into a single, transnational class.

  “Well,” says Franz, “how about a little tour of this city of ours before we head for home?”

  They drive through bright modern streets: tidy parks, tastefully restored old buildings. They drive past the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. They go down the Kurfurstendamm. Franz points out the Volkskammer and the TV Tower from the gloomy days of the DDR. They drive along the boundary fence of Lichtenberg II, reputedly the largest Underclass estate in Europa, looking across with a small frisson (rather as an earlier generation might have looked across the famous Wall) at the monolithic apartment blocks within, where live the gastarbeiters, the unemployed, the outcasts of Europa’s prosperous new order.

  “Of this we are not proud,” says Renate.

  Then all three of them, almost simultaneously, sigh and say: “But it seems this is the price of stability.”

  “Ja, and we shouldn’t forget that the Lichtenbergers have a guaranteed income, healthcare, roofs over their heads,” says Franz as he turns the car away from the gloomy perimeter, back into the bright prosperity of the real Berlin. “It’s more than you can say for the poor in most of the world.”

  He shrugs resignedly, defensively, and changes the subject to more cheerful things. “Now Victor, I seem to recall you have a weakness for VR, I must show you the phantasium. It is the Mecca for all the VR aficionados in the city.”

  “Sounds good!” Victor laughs. He loves VR arcades. They make him feel seventeen again. They give him a sense of wildness and dangerousness which is otherwise almost entirely lacking from his tidy and air-conditioned life.

  He and Franz plunge into the glowing electronic cave of the Phantasium, with the agreeable, conspiratorial feeling that men have when they get together without their women. (Renate has declined to come in, and headed off on another errand.)

  Of course, they have VR in Cambridge too (they also have Underclass estates), but the Phantasium is on a wholly different scale. Victor gives a small, impressed whistle. In an enormous dark chamber, long rows of cages made of plastic tubing stretch into the distance.

  And in nearly every cage, a youth squirms and writhes alone inside a suspended control suit that encloses his arms, legs and face, while he battles in imaginary landscapes against cybernetic phant
oms that he alone can see and touch...

  Other youths wander up and down the rows, sometimes peering into small monitoring screens that give a taste of the electronic dreams and nightmares on offer: “The South Invades,” “Berserkers of Islam,” “Gene-Lab Catastrophe,” “Pump-Action Killer,” “UC Break-out!”...

  “Now that last one is good,” says Franz. “The subject matter is in poor taste I admit, but the graphics and tactiles are brilliant.”

  Victor smiles, runs his credit card over the reader and straps himself into the control suit. Soon he is cheerfully battling against a murderous gang of immigrants and benefit-claimants who have broken out of their concrete estate and are terrorising the good citizens in the neighbouring suburbs. (All educated Europeans know that the Social Compromise is necessary to contain inflation but how they are haunted by those outcasts behind their concrete walls!)

  “Yeah,” he agrees, climbing out. “Pretty sophisticated stuff.”

  At the end of this row of games an archway labelled Liebespielen marks the beginning of an inner sanctum where the games are discreetly boxed in with plywood and have names like ‘Oral Heaven’ and ‘Lust Unlimited.’ The two young men, Franz and Victor, glance surreptitiously through the gateway: Franz gives a hearty German laugh.

  *

  Later, back in Franz and Renate’s apartment, Vince retires to his room and plugs in his lap-top so it can replenish itself with nourishing streams of information. Presently he calls up Lizzie.

  “Oh it’s you, Boo Boo dear,” she says. (How did they start these awful names?) “Did you have a good flight?”

  “Not bad at all.”

  “What’s their flat like?”

  “Oh, like ours really, only bigger.”

  “I’ve got nearly got everything sorted for me to come over. Should be with you by the end of next week.”

  “Great.”

  “You don’t sound very pleased, Boo Boo!”

  For a moment, Victor looks at the face of his beloved and sees this is so, sees that the connection between them is an anxious one, one that exists at the surface only. Deep down neither has touched the other at all. Not even once. Terrified, he blots the insight from his mind.

  “Of course I’m pleased, Liz-Liz. It’s going to seem really strange just being on my own.”

  “Hmmm,” says Lizzie, “I think perhaps I should let you stew on your own for a week on two longer, Boo Boo, and then perhaps you will learn to appreciate me a bit more!”

  Afterwards, Victor can’t sleep. He switches on his laptop again and goes to a news channel.

  Every playground in Europa, it seems, is to be resurfaced in a new rubberised substance called Childsafe, following a tragic accident in Prague when a child fell from a swing... New standards for food hygiene are to be announced by the Commissioner for Health... The sprawling and impoverished Federation of Central Asia is preparing once again for war with its neighbours. A vast crowd swirls round a giant statue of a soldier in heroic pose. The crowd chants. “Death! Death! Death!” “Death to the blasphemers!” “Death for the Motherland is sweeter than a lover’s kiss!” Thousands of fists are thrust up in unison into the air. And the statue gouts real blood from a dozen gaping wounds...

  Victor leans forward closer to the screen. All over Europa, with its safe children’s playgrounds and its pure and hygienic food, healthy and well-fed people are leaning forward like him to watch this reckless energy, this crazy camaraderie with death...

  Every day, according to the news report, citizens of Central Asia queue in their thousands to donate blood for the statue. They are poor and underfed, very often, and can ill afford to give away their lifeblood, but they keep on coming anyway: Never mind that Central Asia’s hospitals have no blood for transfusions, never mind that the needles used for the donations are reused again and again and that AIDS is rampant. The statue’s wounds must flow.

  Victor switches off and goes to a window: Faint smudges of stars are visible in the city sky. He tries to remember which one of those constellations is Cassiopeia.

  *

  Franz and Renate are conscientious hosts. They take Victor to the museums and the historic sites. They take him to concerts and parties. They take him one frosty night to the famous annual parade on the Unter den Linden.

  The starry flag of Europa flies high over the crowds alongside the black and red and gold of the German Bund. Statues and buildings loom eerily in the icy floodlights. Laser beams dance in the sky. There are drum majorettes, and decorated floats, and brass bands in lederhosen. And then, one after another, come the parade’s most famous marchers…

  So many parades have been this way before: Prussian cavalrymen, Nazi brownshirts, goose-stepping soldiers of the DDR… But these are something of quite another kind. They are creatures from prehistory; denizens of the Pleistocene steppes, ancient giants shambling patiently between the Doric columns of the Brandenburg Gate.

  Mammoths!

  Franz and Renate lean on the railings while the animals go by. They have seen the parade before and watch the scene with a proprietorial air, from time to time looking round to check that their guest is suitably impressed.

  They are immense beasts! And they walk with such calm, muscular gravity, such a sense of assurance of their place in the world, that it seems to Victor that perhaps their resurrection was not the incredible and improbable feat of science that it was claimed to be, but rather the result of some basic and inescapable law of nature: if you wait long enough, everything returns.

  “Those huge tusks!”

  “Berlin has 140 mammoths now,” says Franz.

  “New York has twelve,” says Renate. “Even Tokyo only has sixty, even though the Japanese have much freer access to the frozen carcasses in Siberia than we do because of the Eastern Pact.”

  Another huge male lumbers by; and Franz nods in its direction. “They have a few in Russia itself of course, but they are really rather a cheat. Less than 20 percent of the genes are actually authentic mammoth. They are really just glorified Indian elephants with big tusks and added hair. The Berlin mammoths are 80 or 90 percent pure.”

  “Even the New York mammoths are only 70-percent genuine,” says Renate, “and the Americans are having considerable difficulty in successfully breeding from them for that reason...”

  “Something to do with incompatible chromosomes I believe. And most of them have defective kidneys...”

  But Victor the quiet Englishman suddenly gives a strangled cry: “For God’s sake! Can’t you two shut up even for one moment and just look at the things!”

  Franz and Renate gape at him in astonishment, along with a whole segment of the crowd. Just as astonished as they are, Victor turns his back and walks away.

  He has no idea where he is going, but a little later a thought occurs to him. He takes the battered visiting card out of his pocket and heads for the Kreuzberg apartment of Dr Heinrich Gruber.

  *

  “Come in, my friend, come in!”

  It is musty and dark, like a brown cave, full of wood and the smell of pipe smoke, and Victor has the feeling that he is the first visitor for quite some time.

  “Come on through!”

  The old man’s eyebrows bristle with pleasure and animation as he ushers Victor into his small sitting room and dives off into a grubby little kitchen to fetch beer. Victor looks around, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed and wondering why he came.

  The sitting room clearly doubles as Gruber’s study. Half the floor-space is covered in books, journals and papers. On the desk under the window is roughly piled up a long print-out, covered with an unreadable gobbledegook of letters, numbers and punctuation marks.

  …XXQpeNU’B VFF6VV G’NNLPP P*JJVNKL’L JGDSF’E^X MX9*M MMLXV XVOG? KK’B KQQZ…

  “This is Cassiopeian?” Victor asks as Gruber returns with the beer.

  “Ja, ja, that is the standard notation of Cassiopeian.”

  The elderly man rummages through a stack of manila file
s on a small side table. “You probably remember that the message contains a repetitive element? Every 422 days it repeats the same five-day-long passage known as the Lexicon, which turns out to be a ‘Teach Yourself’ guide to the language. The key to understanding it was when we discovered that part of the Lexicon consisted of co-ordinates for a spatial grid. When these were mapped out, they produced pictures. The Cassiopeians taught us the basics of their language by sending us pictures and accompanying each picture with the appropriate word or words...”

  He goes to a computer and taps on keys.

  Suddenly a face stares out at Victor, thin and long, utterly inscrutable, crowned with spiky horns...

  “This one is a female,” says Gruber, tapping another key. “This is a male. This belongs to the third sex, which I call promale. If you remember, the Cassiopeians have a triploid reproductive system, a simple biological fact which permeates the whole of their language, their culture, their metaphysics. They simply do not see the world in terms of black and white, yes or no, positive or negative. Everything is in mutually exclusive threes...”

  He taps more keys and new images roll across the screen: plants and strange animals, buildings strung like spiders’ webs between enormous diagonal struts...

  “They are incredible pictures,” says Victor. “I’ve seen them before of course, when they were in all the papers, but you’re quite right, it’s amazing how quickly we’ve all just forgotten them.”

  Gruber smiles. “The images are fascinating of course, but they are really only the key to the text...”

  Victor smiles. “Which is truly nothing but philosophy?”

  He is dimly aware that this is where the controversy lies: the extent to which the text has really been translated or just guessed at.

  After all, who would think of beaming out philosophy to the stars?

  Gruber nods. “Even though they have made a powerful radio transmitter, the Cassiopeians are not especially sophisticated technologically. They simply don’t put such a high store by science and technology as we do: they consider all that to be only one of three distinct and separate fields of knowledge.”