The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  She had it all planned out. She would not turn on her implant until she was right in the middle of the Circus.

  “YOU’RE VERY WELCOME TO COME ALONG THOUGH!” she shouted, as if she personally controlled access to the public streets.

  She hobbled forward a few steps along the silent ruined avenue (while in the other London, cars swerved around her, pedestrians turned and stared and Lily patiently plodded behind her as if the two of them were Good King Wenceslas and his faithful page).

  “I’ll tell you what though,” Clarissa said, pausing again. Her face was screwed up with the pain of her injured foot, but her tone was nonchalant. “If you felt like calling the council and asking them to get hold of someone physical to come and help me out, I would be grateful… Only my dratted car has QUITE RUN OUT OF POWER you see, so it’s not going to be able to get me back.”

  “I don’t have any money,” said Lily. “Is it an emergency do you think? Shall I call the emergency number?”

  But of course Clarissa couldn’t hear her.

  *

  It was getting dark as she limped into Piccadilly Circus. The buildings were inert slabs of masonry, all those thousands of coloured light bulbs on the old advertising signs were cold and still, and the statue of Eros was more like the angel of death on a mausoleum than the god of physical love.

  Some gusts of rain came blowing down Regent Street. Clarissa’s lips and fingers were blue with cold and her whole body was trembling. (Lily was amazed: she had never seen such a thing, for consensuals are never cold.) Clarissa was in great pain too – the broken bone in her ankle had slipped out of place and felt like a blade being twisted in her flesh – and she was tired and hungry and thirsty. Too late she realised she had left her flask of coffee behind in her abandoned car.

  “You’re a fool, Clarissa Fall,” she told herself. “You don’t look after yourself. One of these days you’ll just keel over and the rats will come and eat you up. And it will be your own stupid fault.”

  Then she remembered her low-res companion.

  “ARE YOU STILL THERE LILY?” she bellowed. “Did you make that CALL FOR ME? I’m just going to get across to the statue there and then I’ll turn my implant on and WE CAN TALK.”

  She hobbled to the base of Eros and then reached up to the implant switch behind her ear. The colour, the electricity, the teeming life of a great city at night came flooding instantly into the desolate scene. There were people everywhere, and cars with shining headlamps and glowing tail-lights, and black taxis and red double-decker buses full of passengers, lit upstairs and down with a cheery yellow glow. But above all there were the lights, the wonderful electric streams of colour that made shining moving pictures and glittering logos and words that flowed across fields of pure colour in purple and red and green and yellow and blue and white.

  “Ah!” cried Clarissa in rapture, “almost like when I was a little girl and the lights were real!”

  “I told you they was lovely,” Lily said, like a pet dog that will wait an hour, two hours, three hours for its mistress to glance in its direction, and still be no less grateful when the longed-for attention finally comes.

  Clarissa turned, smiling, but the sight of Lily’s cartoonish moon-face had an unexpected effect on her. She felt a stab of pity for Lily and at the same time revulsion. Her smile ceased to be real. Her pleasure vanished. She felt the bitter cold of the physical world pushing through, the needle-sharp physical pain nagging at her from her foot, the physical ache in her head that came from tiredness and dehydration.

  Lily sensed her change of mood and the simple line that represented her mouth was just starting to curve downwards when Clarissa switched off her implant again. Lily vanished, along with lights, taxis, buses and crowds. It was very dark and quite silent and the buildings were dim shadows.

  “The thing is, Lily,” Clarissa announced to the empty darkness, “that you consensuals are all just like these lights. Just moving pictures made out of little dots. Just pictures of buses, pictures of cars, pictures of people, pictures of shop windows.”

  Deliberately turning away from where Lily had been, Clarissa turned the implant on again and watched the lights come back. But there was no thrill this time, no exhilarating shock, nothing to offset the cold and the pain. It was no different really from changing channels on a TV set, she thought bitterly, and straight away reached up to flick the implant off again. But now the switch, which was designed to be turned on and off a couple of times a day, finally broke under the strain of her constant fiddling with it and refused to stay in one position or the other. Clarissa’s perceptual field now flickered randomly every few seconds from the consensual to the physical world and back again – and she couldn’t make it stop. She stood helplessly and ineffectually fingering the switch for a short time, then gave up and sank down to the ground at the foot of the statue. What else was there to do?

  “Did you call up the council, Li…” she began, and then the consensual world disappeared. “Oh dear. LILY, ARE YOU STILL THERE?... Oh you are, good. Did you call the council only I think I ought to go home now… Lily? LILY! ARE THE COUNCIL GETTING HELP?... Tell them I don’t want Agents mind. Tell them to get some physicals out. They’ll be cross with me, but they’ll come anyway. I don’t care what Richard said.”

  *

  Actually, whether she liked it or not, Agents were coming, four of them, from different directions, from different errands in different parts of London. They were still some way off but they were on their way. The Hub had sent them, having contacted Richard Howard and been told by him that we physicals wouldn’t come out again.

  Later Richard began to worry about what he’d done and called me.

  “I know it seems harsh,” he said, rather defensively, “but I do feel we’ve got to keep out of this, don’t you agree? Clarissa’s got to learn that when we say something we mean it, or she’ll keep doing this stuff over and over again. I mean she’s in Piccadilly Circus for god’s sake! Even Clarissa must be perfectly well aware that she couldn’t go into central London and get back again in that silly little car of hers. She obviously just assumed that we would come and fetch her. She just banked on it.”

  I was as furious with Clarissa as he was. I had spent the afternoon raking leaves and tidying up in my secluded little garden. I had just eaten a small meal and taken a glass of port and was looking forward to a quiet evening alone in the warm behind drawn curtains, making some preparatory notes for Chapter 62 of my book ‘The Decline and Fall of Reality’. (I had dealt in Chapters 60 and 61 with the advent of the Internet and the mobile telephone and was just getting to what was to be the great central set-piece of my whole account: the moment where the human race is presented for the first time with incontrovertible evidence that its own activity will destroy the planet, not in centuries or even decades but in years, unless it can reduce its physical presence to a fraction of its current levels.)

  “Bloody Clarissa! Bloody bloody Clarissa!”

  Why should I give up the treat of a quiet evening and a new chapter, when she herself had deliberately engineered her own difficulties? I absolutely dreaded going into the centre of London at any time, as Clarissa surely knew, and yet here she was calmly assuming that I could and should be dragged there whenever it suited her convenience. And yet I knew I had to go to her.

  “I can’t leave her to the Agents, though, Richard. I know she’s a pain, I know we’re being used, but I can’t just leave her.”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake, Tom, it’ll teach her a lesson,” Richard said, hardening in his resolve now he had my own flabbiness of will to kick against. “How will she ever learn if we don’t stay firm now? It’s for her own good really. And anyway, the Agents can’t be called off now. You know what they’re like.”

  “Well if they’re going to be there anyway, I’d better be there too,” I said. “They scare her silly. I’ll drive up there now, so at least there’s someone on hand that she knows.”

  I went out into
the cold and started up my car. I resented Clarissa bitterly. I dreaded the dark feelings that trips into London invariably churned up in me, the shame, the embarrassment, the sense of loss, the envy, the deep, deep grief that is like the grief of facing a former lover who belongs now to another and will never never be yours again… I was exhausted by the very thought of the effort of it all, not to mention the discomfort and the cold.

  When I got to Piccadilly Circus, Agents were just arriving, one emerging from Shaftesbury Avenue, one from Piccadilly and one each from the northern and southern branches of Regent Street. But, huddled up under the statue of Eros, Clarissa couldn’t see them, for when she was in purely physical mode it was too dark and when she was in consensual mode they were invisible. Beside her squatted Lily with her consensual arm round Clarissa’s physical shoulder. Sometimes Clarissa could see Lily and sometimes she couldn’t, but either way she could get no warmth from the embrace, however much Lily might want to give it.

  As my physical headlights swept across the physical space, the first thing Clarissa saw was two of the Agents looming out of the darkness and advancing towards her. It felt like some nightmare from her childhood, and she screamed. Then her implant switched on by itself and the lights and the buses and the crowds returned to screen them out. But that was even worse because she knew that behind this glossy facade the Agents were still really there, slowly advancing, though now unseen.

  She screamed again.

  “Keep away from me, you hear me! Just keep away.”

  “Don’t be scared, Clarissa,” said Lily. “I’m here for you.”

  But Lily didn’t have a clue. She had never experienced cold. She had never known physical pain. She wasn’t aware of the presence of the Agents. She had no inkling of the other world of silence and shadow that lay behind the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus.

  I got out of my car. I had my own implant switched on and I picked my way gingerly over the ground between me and Clarissa, knowing only too well how easily nasty physical potholes can be concealed by the virtual road surface. I was doing my best to ignore the many consensual eyes watching me with disapproval and dislike and I was seething all the while with rage at self-obsessed Clarissa for putting me through all this yet again. How dare she drag me out here into the cold night? How dare she expose me to the illusion of the consensual city and to the disapproving gaze of the consensual people, when all I ever wanted was to be at home behind my high hedges that I had cut into the shape of castle walls, behind my locked doors, behind my tightly drawn curtains, writing about reality.

  “You know her do you?” a man asked me. “Well, you want to do something about her, mate. She’s nuts. She’s mental. She needs help.”

  I didn’t respond. I had never known how to speak to these people, so manifestly unreal and yet so obviously alive. I both despised and envied them. How tawdry their constructed world was and how craven their meek acceptance of it. Yet how narrow and dull my own world was by comparison, my bleak garden, my clipped hedges, my book, my nightly glass of port, my weekly sally down the road to the Horse and Hounds, the Last Real Pub, to drink Real Beer with the diminishing band of decrepit and barren old men and woman who call themselves the Last Real People.

  “She needs locking up more like,” said a woman. “That’s the same one that blocked the Northern Line last month with her carrying on. I saw her face in the paper.”

  I picked my way through the traffic.

  “Alight Clarissa,” I called coldly as I came up to her, “I’m here again for you. Muggins is here again as you no doubt expected he would be. I’ve come to fetch you home.”

  “Muggins? Who’s that?” she quavered. She was afraid it was one of the Agents.

  “It’s just me, Clarissa. It’s just Tom.”

  “It’s who?” muttered Clarissa, straining to see me.

  “He said Tom, dear,” Lily told her.

  Clarissa glanced sideways at the cartoon face with its little black dot eyes and its downward curved mouth. Then Lily vanished again, along with the whole Field, and Clarissa was back in the dark physical world. But the lights of my car were there now and, without the distraction of the Field, Clarissa could clearly see me approaching as well as the Agents around me, waiting to step in if I couldn’t resolve things.

  Awkwardly, wincing with pain, she rose to her feet.

  “I just wanted to see the lights again, like they were when I was a child,” she said stubbornly.

  And then she began to spin round on the spot like children sometimes do in play, but very very slowly, shuffling round and round with her feet and grimacing all the while with pain. And as she revolved, the faulty switch on her implant continued to flicker on and off so that, for a few seconds the bright lights and the buses and the cars span around her, and then it was the turn of the darkness that was the source of her coldness and her pain, and it was the dim cold walls of the empty buildings that moved round her, lit only by the headlights of my car.

  Lily appeared and disappeared. When she was there the Agents vanished. When she vanished, they appeared. The one constant was me, who like Clarissa could both feel the physical cold, and see the consensual lights.

  “Come on Clarrie,” I said to her gently. “Come on Clarrie.”

  The old lady ignored me for a while, carrying on with her strange slow-motion spinning and singing a tuneless little song under her breath. People were craning round in cars and buses to look at us. Pedestrians were standing across the road and watching us as frankly as if this really was a Circus and we were there expressly to put on a show.

  Then abruptly Clarissa stopped spinning. She tottered with dizziness, but her eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cornered animal.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “Who exactly are you?”

  It was odd because in that moment everything around me seemed to intensify: the sharpness of the cold night air in the physical world, the brilliance of the coloured lights in the consensual one, the strange collision of the two worlds that my Clarrie had single-handedly brought about… And I found that I didn’t feel angry any more, didn’t even mind that she’d brought me all this way.

  I switched off the implant behind my ear, so that I could check up on what the Agents were doing. But they were still standing back and waiting for me to deal with things.

  “It’s me, Clarrie dear,” I said to her. “It’s Tom. Your brother.”

  The Agent nearest me stiffened slightly and inclined its head towards me, as if I had half-reminded it of something.

  “I reckon you’ve had enough adventure for one day, my dear,” I told my sister, flicking my implant on again to shut the Agents out of my sight. “Enough for one day, don’t you agree? Don’t mind the Agents. I’ve brought the car for you. I’ve come to take you home.”

  She let me lead her to the car and help her inside. She was in a very bad state, trembling, bloodless, befuddled, her injured foot swollen to nearly twice its normal size. I was glad I had thought to bring a rug for her, and a flask of hot cocoa, and a bottle of brandy.

  That strange moon-faced creature, Lily, a human soul inside a cartoon, followed us over and stood anxiously watching.

  “Is she alright?” she asked. “She’s gone so strange. What is it that’s the matter with her?”

  “Yes, she’ll be alright. She’s just old and tired,” I told her, shutting the passenger door and walking round the car to get in myself.

  I flipped off my implant, cutting off Lily and the sights and sounds of Piccadilly Circus. In the dark dead space, the four Agents were silhouetted in the beam of my headlights. They had moved together and were standing in a row. I had the odd idea that they wished they could come with us, that they wished that someone would come to meet them with rugs and brandy and hot cocoa.

  I got my sister comfortable and started up the car. I was going to drive like she always did, with my implant deactivated, unable to see the consensual traffic. I didn’t like doing it. I knew how arrogant it mu
st seem to the consensuals and how much they must resent it – it was things like that, I knew, that gave us Outsiders a bad name – but I just couldn’t risk a broken axle on the way home on top of everything else.

  “Really, we’re no different when you come to think of it,” said Clarrie after a while. Her implant was off at that moment and she looked out at abandoned streets as lonely as canyons on some lifeless planet in space. “That’s the physical world out there, that’s physical matter. But we’re not like that, are we? People are patterns. We’re just patterns rippling across the surface.”

  “Have a bit more brandy, Clarrie,” I told her, “and then put the seat back and try to get some sleep. It’s going to be some time before we get back.”

  She nodded and tugged the rug up around herself. Her implant switched itself on again and she saw a taxi swerve to avoid us and heard the angry blast of its horn. Briefly the busy night life of the Consensual Field was all around her. And then it was gone again.

  “Just the same,” she said sleepily. “Just like the lights in Piccadilly Circus.”

  Jazamine in the Green Wood

  Memorial Day.

  I got out of bed and opened the window. Birdsong rippled through the mild creamy air and a fat old woman pushed her bike up from the allotments with its basket laden with a spring harvest of leeks and sprouting broccoli.

  “Morning has broken, like the first morning…”

  She was singing that old hymn.

  Well, yes, I thought. I suppose it is on days like this that we should thank God for all Her munificence: for light, for air, for sunlight, for the great dance of the planets and stars… But let us not forget to mention tuberculosis too, and beriberi and cholera and TTX.

  (TTX. Ah yes, now, there is proof, if any more were needed, that God is truly a She!)

  I pulled on my jumper and jeans and struggled into my specially adapted boots.

  And do I thank God for my feet? I demanded. Do I thank Her for the curse of being born a boy? Do I thank Her for my good kind reasonable parents, who have cut me off from the whole world with their good intentions, their damned principles?