Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  But eventually the leaders of the town go out of the gate. Here they are look: big fat huthi grandees in robes with their escort of huthi soldiers. They spend half an hour or so with the Wanderers, then confer among themselves. Finally the leader of the grandees turns and addresses us all on the walls. Look at her fine purple robes.

  “Fellow citizens of Formara. We have met these boys and decided that we will open the gate for them tomorrow.”

  Howls of incredulity and disgust all round.

  “What?! These pathetic specimens! I’ve seen more life in a limp lettuce leaf!”

  That sort of thing. Look at the faces though. It’s all part of the game. The Wanderers are never good enough. The grandees are always nuts to let them in.

  Anyway, the grandee in purple holds up her hands again for silence.

  “We will open the gate, but it will be for a gauntlet run only! We are giving these boys an opportunity, but they must prove themselves worthy of our Mothers.”

  A gauntlet run! Wow! The crowd erupts! You’ve never seen anything like it. They were absolutely cock-a-hoop. And pretty soon the wall starts to empty as all the excited huthi and their foster-children run back down into the town to start getting ready.

  Ah, here are some more of those bowava balloons. I don’t quite know how they got in here.

  The toilet? Yes of course. It’s upstairs and straight across the landing.

  *

  And now this is the build-up for the run.

  You see all the huthi are jostling for space on the street outside their houses, trying to get a good position for themselves and their foster-children. These are Bunnoo and Thrompin’s neighbours and their kids. We loved that little girl, didn’t we Lydia? Five years old. Look at that grin! That’s a basket of tomatoes she’s got there. Her big sister has got a bucket of mud.

  Here is Bunnoo, look, with her big stick, limbering up gleefully for the sport.

  “Boy are there going to be some sore arses when I’m done!” she chortles.

  (Yet you couldn’t imagine a milder, gentler person than Bunnoo.)

  Ah, and here are Karl and Kara, look, together as usual, with a big sack of vegetable scraps. Thrompin there has some rotten eggs. Everyone seems to save up rubbish especially for these occasions.

  Here’s a view of the whole street. It’s all a big party for them, a gauntlet run, it’s like a carnival.

  Here is Karl again. Oh no sorry, it’s Kara. The two of them are so alike!

  Down below meanwhile, the soldiers have done a bit of scouting around to make sure there aren’t more Wanderers hiding out there somewhere, ready to make a surprise attack when the gate is opened. (That’s always the worry. The Wanderers will take over a town, murder the huthi and set up with the Mothers. After all, no other human society has such a thing as huthi! Remote as Apirania is, they are dimly aware of that.)

  Once the soldiers were satisfied there wasn’t going to be an attack, the town grandees gave the order, and they let those twenty Wanderers in. We were halfway up the hill, but we knew at once when it had happened because of the shouting that went up.

  Pretty soon afterwards the first of them appeared. Here he is look. Poor kid, he was already covered in eggs and tomatoes and so on, not to mention bleeding from his head. And here is kind gentle Bunnoo if you please, running out to hit him with a stick and grinning all over her jolly face. Then more eggs and tomatoes and a whole bucketful of mud. And everyone shouting out that he’s not a proper man at all and you’d need a magnifying glass to see his… Well, you get the picture.

  (He gave up pretty soon after, actually. He stopped and walked back down to the gate. No-one harasses them when they’ve given up. Someone by the gate sorts them out with food and a jug of beer and a pat on the head before shoving them back outside.)

  But here’s the next one. A bit more determined looking, isn’t he? And the one right behind him was pretty determined too. He was the oldest of them and their spokesman the previous night.

  Ah, this is another one who gave up.

  “Well done, lad,” goes Thrompin, who five minutes earlier was telling him he was the most pathetic excuse for a man she had ever seen.

  “Better luck next time,” says Bunnoo.

  Poor kid, he was crying.

  Only about ten of them got as far as where we were. The rest had already given up. As soon as the Wanderers had passed them all the kids would run up the narrow little steps between the houses that are a shortcut between the loops of the road so as to get ahead of them again. They wanted to chuck a few more eggs at any Wanderers who got to the top, and to see them go in at the door of the Motherhouse, if any of them got that far.

  Only two actually did. The spokesman and one other. Here you are, look. (I ran up after the kids, you see, and managed to catch the moment when the door opened for the second one. Lydia wasn’t quick enough, to her great chagrin. Not quite as young as we were, eh, Lyds?)

  It’s an imposing building the Motherhouse isn’t it? Like the keep of some medieval castle. They hung out those green and red flags in honour of the occasion. Green for fertility, red for blood I believe. Right up at the top there you can see some of the older Mothers looking down over the battlements. The younger ones are confined inside.

  Here’s a closer shot. You can see that the gauntlet continued right up to the door. Got worse in fact. Those are huthi soldiers there, poking this boy with the butts of their spears.

  I know. He’s really bleeding quite badly.

  But as soon as the door opened the jeers turned to cheers. A couple of young Mothers were in there to greet him and lead him off to wash him and tend to his wounds. You can just see him there. It’s a bit dark I know, but there he is, looking forward to a week of banquets and pampering and sex with every Mother he wants, before he has to go back out again onto the plain.

  No, it’s not a very good shot I’m afraid. Everyone was pushing to get a view and I was being jostled. You can’t really get much sense of what it might be like inside.

  *

  Ah yes. Now these are the Wanderers who didn’t make it, back at their camp outside. At least they’ve all got something to eat now, and some new clothes and blankets. And the kids are up on the walls until all hours calling down questions to them.

  “What town did you come from then?”

  “How come you gave up so quickly?”

  “How did you get that bandaged arm?”

  Look at their moothai tucking into that pile of cabbages!

  And here is Karl on the wall, look. He’s asking them questions about what it’s like on the plain. Now that the excitement of the run is over it’s all become a bit more real for him. He really wants some answers.

  The Wanderers are telling him it’s absolutely brilliant, and how they have been into dozens of Motherhouses and been with scores of Mothers – and how they just didn’t really feel like it this time or they would have completed the run with ease. Formara’s nothing, apparently, compared to some of the towns they’ve been to. Formara is an absolute breeze.

  But look at Karl’s face. What’s going on behind those narrowed eyes?

  Does anyone need another drink? Lydia, could you do the honours?

  *

  Yes, now this is a few months later. A couple more groups of Wanderers have been and gone including one group that was judged too large to safely let inside the walls. And now it’s the ceremony which they call the Tukanza. The Division.

  You can see this is the Motherhouse again, but the flags are black and white this time. And here are the pubescent boys and girls going in wearing their black and white Tukanza robes. We weren’t allowed inside, sadly, and people were rather vague about what went on. Actually I think the huthi honestly don’t know much about it. They don’t even seem to care. As far as they are concerned, the Tukanza is just a little quirk of the merthi and the manahi. Ordinary People have better things to do with their time!

  Here are Karl and Kara going in. Don’t they lo
ok tense? And small too, under that great towering wall of the Motherhouse.

  Kara told me later that at least she would be able to be with her mother now.

  Here are some more kids going in. You can see their foster-parents anxiously wishing them luck. Then the door closes.

  I waited outside. It’s a nice spot. This is the view over the plain. Even from the foot of the Motherhouse there’s a good view in several directions. It must be wonderful from the top. And look at the balloons from the bowava trees. The wet season has been and gone and the sky is starting to fill up with them. Wanderers, the Apiranians often call them, merthi, just like the men. Have I mentioned that already?

  Yes, it is bleak out there on the plain. Bleak and windy and dry.

  Now, here they are coming out again. Haven’t they changed? Kara has been told that in another month she’ll be moving in there. And when that happens, Karl and the other boys of his age will be turned out onto the plain with a mootha or two and some provisions, and an exhortation to respect all Mothers and never besmirch the reputation of Formara, though they are never ever to return there.

  Look at the strain in their faces. The others are crowding around them trying to make a fuss of them but Karl and Kara are far, far away. Another month and they’ll have to say goodbye to each other and never meet again.

  What’s this? Oh it’s that mouse on the gear wheel just before... (Why did you take that picture Lydia, for goodness sake?)

  Now look at these balloons. It’s an Apiranian custom after the Tukanza. Bunnoo and Thrompin gathered them from a bowava tree (not an easy thing to do!) and they gave them to Karl and Kara to release them from the square in front of the Motherhouse.

  Here they are look, Karl and Kara releasing them one by one, while all the others watch and cheer. Look at their balloons going up into the sky, to join all the others that are blowing past.

  Look: a couple quite low and then three more – can you see them? – high, high up among the clouds.

  *

  More drinks anyone? Are you hungry? Would you like anything else to eat?

  We’ve got some pictures from our trip to Pazzazza up in the Pleiades that we haven’t shown you.

  Now that was something really special.

  Piccadilly Circus

  Clarissa Fall is heading for central London to see the lights, bumping along the potholed roads at five miles an hour in her electric invalid car, oblivious to the honking horns, the cars queuing behind her, the angry shouts. How many times has she been warned? How many times has she been humiliated? But she must see the lights.

  “When I was a little girl there were still physical lights in Piccadilly Circus,” she’s telling everyone she can. “I remember my father taking me. They were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.”

  *

  She’d always been odd. There was that business when she cut holes in the wildlife fence to let the animals into the city. There were those young consensual tearaways she used to insist on bringing home. But things really started getting bad when her husband Terence died, leaving her alone in that big old house by the perimeter, that big fake chateau with its empty fountains and those icy lights that lit it up at night like Dracula’s castle. I suppose it was loneliness, though when Terence was alive he and Clarissa never seemed to do anything but fight.

  “I am two hundred years old, you know,” she kept saying now. “I am the very last physical human being in London.”

  Neither of these was true, of course, but she was certainly very old and it was certainly the case that she could go for days and even weeks without seeing another physical person. There really weren’t many of us left by now and most of us had congregated for mutual support in a couple of clusters in the South London suburbs. No one lived within five miles of Clarissa’s phoney chateau on the northern perimeter and no one was much inclined to go and see her. She’d always been histrionic, now she was downright crazy. What’s more – and most of us found this particularly unforgivable – she drew unwelcome attention onto us physicals, not only from the consensuals, who already dislike us and call us ‘Outsiders’ and ‘spooks’, but also from the hidden authorities in the Hub.

  Her trouble was that she didn’t really feel at home in either world, physical or consensual. The stiff arthritic dignity of the physicals repelled her. She thought us stuffy and smug and she despised our assumption that our own experience was uniquely authentic and true.

  “Would you rather the world itself ended than admit the possibility that there may be other kinds of life apart from ours?” she once demanded.

  But really, although she always insisted to us that it wasn’t so, she was equally disgusted by the superficiality of the consensuals, their uncritical willingness to accept as real whatever the Hub chose to serve up, their lack of curiosity, their wilful ignorance of where they came from or what they really were. While she might criticise us physicals, she never seriously considered the possibility of giving up her own physical being and joining the consensuals with their constructed virtual bodies. And this meant that she would still always be an Outsider to them.

  She may have felt at home with no one but she became a nuisance to everyone – physical and consensual – as a result of her forays into the city. At first she went on foot. Then, when she became too frail, she got hold of that little invalid car, a vehicle which the consensuals of North London would soon come to know and hate. Bumping slowly along the crumbling physical roads she would switch off her Field implant so as not to be deceived by the smooth virtual surface, but this meant that she couldn’t see or hear the consensual traffic going by either. She could see only the empty buildings and the cracked and pockmarked empty road. Consensual drivers just had to cope as best they could with her wanderings back and forth.

  When she parked her car, though, she always turned her implant on again. This of course instantly transformed empty ruined physical London into the lively metropolis that was the Urban Consensual Field, a virtual city in imitation of London as it once was, superimposed by the Hub over what London had become. Clarissa could still just remember those old days: the crowds, the fumes, the lights, the noise, the hectic life of a city in which, bizarrely, it still seemed feasible for millions of physical human beings to casually consume what they wanted of the physical world’s resources, and casually discard what they didn’t. And she craved that bustle and that life, she craved it desperately.

  We all had Field implants of course. They were a necessity for dealing with a civilisation that had become, whether we liked it or not, primarily digital. Spliced into our nervous system, they allowed consensual constructs to be superimposed over our perceptions of the physical world, so that we could see the same world that the consensuals saw, hear what they heard and, to a limited degree, touch what they touched. The rest of us invariably took the position that we didn’t like having to deal with the consensual world, but it was sometimes a necessary evil. But for Clarissa it was different. When she switched on her implant it just wasn’t a matter of practical necessity for her, it was more like injecting heroin into an artery. All at once there were people all around her, there was life, there were shop windows and market stalls piled high with colourful merchandise, and the dizzying suddenness of it was like the hit of a powerful drug.

  But her addiction wasn’t so much to the Field itself as to the moment of crossing over. After that first moment the experience never quite lived up to its initial promise, for however hard Clarissa tried, the consensual world shut her out. And she did try. She spent hours in the consensual city outside shops and in parks and on street corners making rather pathetic efforts to engage people in conversation, but most people avoided her and some made no secret of their contempt. It was true that a few kind souls suppressed their revulsion at her age and her physicality and briefly allowed her the illusion that she had made a friend, but it was only out of kindness. Even apart from being an Outsider she really wasn’t very good company anyway. She talked too much;
she didn’t listen; and, what was worse, however much she might criticise her fellow Outsiders for our existential snobbery, she herself was as much of a snob as any of us and a lot less inhibited about it. She could never resist pointing out to consensuals the shallow and illusory nature of their existence:

  “You’re so very nice dear. It’s such a pity that you’re not really here.”

  Usually she found herself alone in a kind of lacuna, with people moving aside to pass her by at a safe distance. And in these situations she would often become distressed and start to rant and shout:

  “You’re not real you know! You’re just bits of nervous tissue plugged into a computer! You’re far away from here, suspended in jars of nutrients, and the computer is sending you pictures of the real London with all this consensual nonsense superimposed on top of it!”

  Terence used to talk like that a lot when he was alive, as haughty old physicals tended to do, but in those days Clarissa always used to criticise him for it:

  “Who’s to say our world is more real than theirs?” I remember her demanding of him at one of the physical community’s periodic gatherings, the two of them on opposite sides of a large dining table laden with silver and fine china and cut glass.

  Terence declined to answer. Everyone in the room was willing Clarissa to shut up and let us return to our customary state of numbness.

  “Come on Terence, who’s to say?” she insisted. “At least consensuals engage with life and with one another.”

  She glared up and down the table.

  “And what do you think would be left of us if we stripped away everything that had come from outside ourselves, everything that other people had made? We’d be naked. We’d be gibbering imbeciles. Think about it. Even when we talk to ourselves inside our own heads, we use words that other people gave us.”

  But that was then. Now it seemed that Terence had been speaking all along on behalf of another side of Clarissa’s own self.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” she’d scold the consensuals when they pointed and laughed at her, “You sold your true bodies for the illusion of youth and plenty, but I am real!”