Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  She looked at her husband.

  “Are you going to… I mean you’re not going to point the camera at him are you? You’re not going to show him himself?”

  She was pretending to warn Terence not to do it, Lemmy noticed, but really she was making quite sure that he wouldn’t forget.

  “Yeah, go on then, show me,” he said wearily, knowing already what he would see.

  The old man swept the camera round the room. On the TV screen Lemmy saw Clarissa sitting in an armchair. He saw a painting of dead pheasants. He saw the dying embers of the fire and the corner of the dark-red sofa where he was sitting. And then, though he really didn’t want to look, he saw the whole sofa.

  Of course, just as he had somehow guessed it would be, it was empty.

  “Alright then,” Lemmy said in a tight voice. “So if I’m not really here, then where am I?”

  “I can show you that too if you want,” said Terence, still not looking at him, but addressing him directly for the first time. “Come upstairs and I’ll show you…”

  “Oh Terence,” murmured Clarissa. “It’s an awful lot for him to take in. I really think we should…”

  Yet she was already getting eagerly to her feet.

  *

  Lemmy followed them up the wide marble staircase to the first landing. Progress was slow. The old man, who for some reason was carrying the camera with him, had to pause several times to rest and catch his breath.

  “Let me carry it, Terence!” Clarissa said to him impatiently each time. “You know you don’t like the stairs.”

  “I’m fine,” he wheezed, his face flushed, his eyes moist and bloodshot. “Don’t fuss so.”

  On the landing there were three glass cases, the first containing fossil shells, the second geological specimens, the third a hundred dead hummingbirds arranged on the branches of an artificial tree. Some of the little iridescent birds had fallen from their perches and were dangling from strands of wire; a few lay at the bottom of the case. The old man hobbled on to the second set of stairs.

  “Here’s another sensor,” he said, glancing, just for a moment, back at Lemmy.

  He laid down the camera, stood on tiptoes and, gasping for breath, reached up to rap at something with his knuckles. It was a bit like the wind in the trees again. Lemmy could clearly hear the hollow sound of some hard surface being struck, but all he could see was Terence’s liver-spotted hand rapping at thin air. And when Lemmy stepped forward himself and reached up into the same space, he could find nothing solid there at all.

  “Terence disconnected this sensor once,” said Clarissa. “Very naughty of him – we had to pay a big fine – but he unplugged it and…”

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll unplug it now,” Terence said, reaching out. “I’ll unplug it now and show this young fellow how his…”

  And suddenly there was no staircase, no Clarissa, no Terence, just a flickering blankness and a fizzing rush of white noise. When Lemmy moved his foot there was nothing beneath it. When he reached out his hand there was no wall. When he tried to speak, no sound came. It was if the world had not yet been created.

  Then a message flashed in front of him in green letters:

  Local sensor error!

  …and a soothing female voice spoke inside Lemmy’s head.

  “Apologies. There has been a local sensor malfunction. If not resolved in five seconds you will be relocated to your home address or to your nominated default location. One…Two…Three…”

  But then he was back on the stairs again, in Clarissa’s and Terence’s decaying mansion.

  “Reconnect it now Terence!” Clarissa was shouting at her husband. “Now! Do you hear me?”

  “Oh do shut up you silly woman. I already have reconnected it.”

  “Yeah,” said Lemmy, “I’m back.”

  “I’m so sorry, Lemmy,” Clarissa said, taking his arm. “Terence is very cruel. That must have been…”

  The old man had already turned away and was labouring on up the stairs.

  On the second landing, there was a case of flint arrow-heads, another of Roman coins and a third full of pale anatomical specimens preserved in formaldehyde: deformed embryos, a bisected snake, a rat with its belly laid open, a strange abysmal fish with teeth like needles… Between the last two cases there was a small doorway with a gothic arch which led to the foot of a cramped spiral staircase. They climbed up it to a room which perched above the house in a faux-medieval turret.

  The turret had windows on three sides. On the fourth side, next to the door, there was a desk with an antique computer on it. In the spaces between the windows there were packed bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Books and papers were stacked untidily on the desk and across the floor, most of them covered in thick dust.

  “Terence’s study,” sniffed Clarissa. “He comes up here to do his world-famous research, though oddly enough no one in the world but him seems to know anything about it.”

  Terence ignored this. He placed his glass contraption on his nose and groped awkwardly behind the computer to find the port for the camera lead, snuffling and muttering all the while.

  “Are you sure you want to see this Lemmy?” asked Clarissa. “I mean this must all be a bit of a…”

  “There we are,” said the old man with satisfaction as the monitor came to life.

  He carried the camera to the North-facing window, and propped it on the sill. Lemmy followed him and looked outside. He could see the garden down below with its ice-green lights and its fountains and roses. Beyond it was the procession of orange lights and signs (one sign for every five lights) winding to the West and to the East that marked the edge of the city. Beyond that was the empty space, the spare-channel void, flickering constantly with random, meaningless pinpricks of light.

  “You won’t be able to see anything through the window,” said Terence, glancing straight at Lemmy for a single brief moment. “You’re relying on sensors and they won’t show you anything beyond the Field. But of course the room sensor will pick up whatever’s on the monitor for you because the monitor is here in the room.”

  Lemmy looked round at the monitor. The old man was fiddling with the camera angle and what Lemmy saw first, jiggling about on the screen, was the garden immediately below. It was different from what he had just seen out of the window. The lights were still there, but there were no roses. The ground was bare concrete and the ponds were bald empty holes. Beyond the garden, the lights and warning signs around the perimeter looked just the same on the screen as they had looked out of the window, but beyond them there was no longer a complete void, no longer the flickering blankness. The tall chain link wildlife fence was clearly visible and, beyond that, night and the dark shapes of trees.

  The old man stopped moving the camera about and let it lie on the sill again so that it was pointing straight outwards. And now Lemmy saw on the screen a large concrete building, some way beyond the perimeter. Windowless and without the slightest trace of ornament, it was surrounded by a service road, cold white arc-lights and a high fence.

  “That is where you are, my friend,” said the old man, leaving the camera and coming over to peer at the screen through his glass discs. “That is the London Hub, the true location of all the denizens of the London Consensual Field. You’re all in there, row after row of you, each one of you looking like nothing so much as a scoop of grey porridge in a goldfish bowl.”

  “Oh honestly Terence!” objected Clarissa.

  “On each of five storeys,” Terence went on, “there are two parallel corridors half a mile long. Along each corridor there are eight tiers of shelving, and on each shelf, every fifty centimetres, there is another one of you. And there you sit in your goldfish bowls, all wired up together, dreaming that you have bodies and limbs and genitals and pretty faces….”

  “Terence!”

  “Every once in a while,” the old man stubbornly continued, “one of you shrivels up and is duly replaced by a new blob of porridge, cultured from cel
ls in a vat somewhere, and dropped into place by a machine. And then two of you are deceived into thinking that you have conceived a child and given birth, when in fact…”

  “Terence! Stop this now!”

  The old man broke off with a derisive snort. Lemmy said nothing, his eyes fixed on the monitor.

  “Of course you’re wonderful for the environment,” Terence resumed, after only the briefest of pauses. “That was the rationale, after all. That was the excuse. As I understand it, two hundred and fifty of you don’t use as much energy or cause as much pollution as one manipulative old parasite like my dear Clarissa here – or one grumpy old fossil like me. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there isn’t much more to any of you than there is to one of those pickled specimens I’ve got down on the landing there, or that your lives are an eternal video game in which you’ve been fooled into thinking you really are the cartoon characters you watch and manipulate on the screen.”

  “Why do you do this, Terence?” Clarissa cried. Why are you so cruel?”

  The old man gave a bark of derision.

  “Cruel? Me? You hypocrite, Clarissa. You utter hypocrite. It’s you that keeps bringing them back here, these pretty boys, these non-existent video-game boys. Why would you do that to them if you didn’t want to confront them with what they really are?”

  He laughed.

  “Yes, and why keep cutting those holes in the fence.”

  Clarissa gasped. Her husband grinned at her.

  “If you didn’t want me to find out, my dearest, you should have put the wire cutters back in the shed where you found them. You cut the holes so that animals will wander down into the city and lure back more boys for you to bring home. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re not going to try and deny it?”

  Clarissa gave a thin, despairing wail.

  “Alright Terence, alright. But Lemmy is here now. Lemmy is here!”

  “No he’s not! He’s not here at all. We’ve already established that. He’s over there on a shelf in a jar of formaldehyde – or whatever substance it is that they pickle them in. He only seems to be here and we could very easily fix that by the simple act of turning off our implants. Why don’t you turn yours off now if his presence distresses you? Even better, we could unplug the sensor and then even he won’t think he’s here. There’ll be only you and me, up here all alone with our big empty house beneath us.”

  Clarissa turned to Lemmy.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him. You’re as real as we are. You just live in a different medium from us, that’s all, a more modern medium, a medium where you can be young and strong and healthy all your life, and never grow wrinkly and bitter and old like us. That’s the truth of it, but Terence just can’t accept it.”

  But Lemmy didn’t answer her. He was watching the monitor. An enormous articulated truck had pulled up outside the London Hub and was now passing through a gate which had slid open automatically to let it in. Oddly, the cabin of the truck had no windows, so he couldn’t tell who or what was driving it.

  “Why don’t you go over there and join them then, Clarissa my dear?” sneered Terence, his old eyes gleaming. “Why don’t you get your brains spooned out into a jar and yourself plugged into the Field?”

  Lemmy crept still closer to the screen.

  “Hey look! He’s out there! That white animal. Way over there by that big grey place.”

  “Lemmy, Lemmy,” cried Clarissa, rushing over to him, “you’re so…”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake get a grip woman!” snapped the old man.

  He dragged a chair into the middle of the room.

  “What you doing?” she cried.

  “I’m going to do what you should have done from the beginning. Send this poor wretch home.”

  Wobbling dangerously, he climbed onto the chair and reached up towards an invisible object below the ceiling.

  *

  “Apologies. There has been a local sensor malfunction. If not resolved in five seconds you will be relocated to your home address or to your nominated default location. One…Two…Three…Four… Five….”

  Lemmy was sitting in the corner chair in the cosy, cramped little living room that he shared with his parents, Dorothy and John. John was watching TV. Mouser, their blue cartoon cat, was curled up on the fluffy rug in front of the fire. (The man at Dotlands market had claimed he had an organic central nervous system. Who knows? Perhaps he did. Perhaps at the back of some shelf in the London Hub, he had a small-sized goldfish bowl and his own small-sized scoop of porridge.)

  In with a flourish came Lemmy’s mother wearing a new dress.

  “Da-da!”

  She gave a little twirl and Lemmy’s dad (who looked like a rock‘n’roll star from the early days, except that he smiled far too easily) turned round in his armchair and gave an approving whistle.

  “Oh hello Lemmy darling!” said Dorothy. “I didn’t hear you come in!”

  “Blimey!” exclaimed his father. “Me neither! You snuck in quietly mate. I had no idea you was in the room!”

  “So what do you think then, Lemmy?” Dorothy asked.

  “Yeah, nice dress mum,” Lemmy said.

  “It’s not just the dress sweetheart. Your kind dad’s given me a lovely early birthday present and got me upgraded to 256 colours. Can you see the difference? I think I look great!”

  “Here comes the rain,” said Lemmy’s dad.

  They could always tell it was raining from the faint grey streaks that appeared in the room, like interference on TV. Not that they minded. The streaks were barely visible and they made it feel more cosy somehow, being inside in the warm with the TV and the fire going. It had never occurred to Lemmy or his parents to wonder what caused them.

  But in that moment Lemmy suddenly understood. The house had no physical roof. It had no physical ceilings, no physical upstairs floor, nothing to keep out the physical rain that fell from the physical sky. In the physical world there was no TV here, no fire, no lights, no fluffy rug, no comfy chairs, no Mouser or Dorothy or Lemmy or John, just an empty shell of brick, open to the sky, a ruin among many others, in the midst of an abandoned city.

  “I thought your skin looked nice, mum,” he said bravely. “256 colours, eh? That explains it.”

  Dorothy laughed and ruffled his hair.

  “Liar! You wouldn’t have even noticed if I hadn’t told you.”

  She sat down next to her husband on the settee and snuggled up against him to watch TV.

  Lemmy moved his chair closer to the fire and tried to watch with them, tried to give himself over to it as he’d always done before, back in the days before Clarissa Fall let in that white hart from the forest beyond the perimeter.

  Valour

  Here comes Victor, hurtling through the stratosphere on the Lufthansa shuttle: a shy, thin young Englishman, half-listening to the recorded safety instructions.

  “Drinks, anyone? Drinks?” says the hostess: blonde, with high heels, makeup and a short, tight dress. Victor reminds himself, with a certain eerie jolt, that she isn’t human. She’s a synthetik – a robot clothed in living tissue. Lufthansa use them on all their flights now. They are cheaper than real women, they do not require time off, and they are uniformly beautiful...

  “Disconcerting, isn’t it?” says the passenger next to him, an elderly German with a humorous mouth and extraordinarily mobile eyebrows. “You find yourself admiring them without really thinking about it – and then suddenly you remember they are only machines.”

  Victor smiles just enough to avoid impoliteness. He does not enjoy chatting to strangers. Unfortunately his companion does not feel the same.

  “My name is Gruber,” says the elderly German, extending a large friendly hand. “Heinrich Gruber, I am a student of philosophy and philology. How about you?”

  “I’m a computer scientist.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Silicon City – it’s outside Cambridge – but I’m taking a sabbatical in Berlin.”


  Gruber chuckles. “Think of that! A Silicon City, a city devoted to the disembodied mind!”

  And as if to disassociate himself from any charge of being disembodied, he cranes round to stare at the comely bottom of the robot hostess as she stoops to take a bottle out of her trolley. He turns back to Victor, eyebrows wriggling with amusement:

  “And yet if she was a real human hostess and you and I were sitting here quietly eyeing her up the way men do, would the position really be so different? It would not be her soul after all that was on our minds?”

  The eyebrows arch up triumphantly: Victor colours slightly.

  “Soul? I see you are a dualist,” says Victor, with a little laugh, so as to move the subject onto less personal ground.

  Gruber frowns. “Dualist? My dear fellow, I study the philosophy of the Cassiopeians. I am a trialist. I am a trialist through and through!”

  Victor smiles politely, looks at his watch and opens his laptop so as to discourage Gruber from carrying on the conversation. Conversation is such hard work. It involves having to be someone.

  “Your wife?” asks Gruber, nodding at the picture of a rather tense-looking young woman on Victor’s desktop.

  “My girlfriend,” says Victor, for some reason blushing. “She’s a computer scientist too, back in Cambridge.”

  Gruber smiles his amiable, knowing smile. He takes out a battered paperback, folds it brutally back on itself and reads, glancing across from time to time at the young Englishman whose hands dart so quickly and neatly over the keyboard.

  Darkness starts to fall outside. Stars appear: Orion, Taurus. An evening meal is served by the pretty robots.

  “They make their flesh from genetically modified shellfish tissue, I believe,” says Gruber loudly, swivelling stiffly round in his seat to look at the hostess. “Patella Aspera, the common limpet. It’s good at clinging onto things!”