Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  The thing suspended in the water was dark red like congealed blood, its half-formed face an eyeless, orifice-less sculpture made of blood. All over its surface were hundreds of fine, branching strands, which at first seemed to be some kind of growth like seaweed, but then turned out not to be solid outgrowths at all but patterns of inward movement, rivulets of matter being drawn from the surrounding fluid and streaming into the solid mass of the body.

  “Recognise the face at all?” asked Mr Thomas.

  Karel looked at the eyeless mask. Red as it was, eyeless and hairless as it was, covered as it was by the little branching rivulets, the resemblance wasn’t immediately obvious, but now that he looked more closely it was unmistakeable. This thing was a likeness of himself.

  “We always make several copies,” said Mr Thomas. “It gives us a margin of error. If we’re too rough with the first copy and it goes and dies on us, we can fall back on one of the others. Copies aren’t quite as resilient as originals unfortunately. In fact, in about ten per cent of cases, you can’t even get the heart to start and we just have to bin the things.”

  He looked down thoughtfully into the mineral bath.

  “It’s funny. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen this, I still always find myself wondering why they don’t drown down there, and why they don’t float or sink to the bottom. It’s hard to get your head round the fact that it isn’t a living entity at all at this stage. Nothing is moving in there. The field is a rigid template, the matter flows into it, and once every particle is in place, it is locked there, completely and utterly motionless. It’s the ultimate in suspended animation.”

  They moved towards the third Inducer.

  “This will only have been started a short time ago,” said Mr Thomas as the panel slid open.

  At first this one seemed empty – there was certainly no solid object in there – but after a moment Karel made out a faint reddish vaguely man-shaped blur. Mr Thomas took an aluminium pole which rested against the Inducer and stirred the liquid until the reddish mist had disappeared. Then he laid down the pole again and they watched as the wispy shape slowly began to reassert itself.

  “Suppose what you say is true,” said Karel/Heinz. “Suppose that I am only a copy of Karel Slade. Why tell me?”

  Mr Thomas glanced at Mr Occam.

  “Well in a certain sense, Heinz, it doesn’t make much difference to us whether you believe yourself to be the original or the copy. Either way you have the information we want and we’re going to extract it from you by any means possible. And if that involves razors, that’s too bad. If it involves putting vinegar on your scalded flesh or pulling off your nails with pliers, that’s too bad too. But it does seem unfair. So Mr Occam and I, when we talked outside earlier, we agreed that you might like to reflect on your position a bit before we go any further.”

  “What do you mean, my position?”

  “Think about it Heinz. Think it through. If you resist and we have to hurt you, you won’t be suffering on your own account but on behalf of Karel Slade. You’ve never been part of the SHG. We know that. In fact we’re your alibi. We can vouch for the fact that we fished you out of the soup ourselves, only a few hours ago. So there’s no doubt about it, you’ve never ordered anyone’s death. You’ve never harmed anyone at all.”

  Mr Thomas took hold of Karel’s throne by the arms and turned it to face him.

  “You’re an innocent man, Heinz,” he said. “Why should you suffer on behalf of someone else? Why should Mr Slade be protected by the law while we torture you to try and stop his wrong-doing.”

  “Even if I am… Even if I’m not…”

  Karel glanced at the misty red phantom of himself suspended in the mineral bath. Tears came welling up into his eyes.

  “I mean whatever I am,” he persisted, fighting them back, “my beliefs are still the same.”

  “Hey, hang on a minute there, Heinz, are you quite sure about that?” protested Mr Thomas. “Your beliefs the same? Think about that for a minute. Think, for instance, about what Karel Slade would think of you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wake up Heinz!” said Mr Occam giving the throne a rough shake. “Wakey wakey! You’re a copy, remember? You’re an abomination against God. That’s what Karel Slade thinks, doesn’t he? He thinks that even the lab technicians who make things like you deserve to be killed. And as for you yourself, well you’re just an object to him, aren’t you? You’re just a thing.”

  “That’s right isn’t it Heinz?” asked Mr Thomas. “In Slade’s book you’re not even a person. You have no soul and no feelings. You have no rights, not even a right to pity. Think about it. That man we watched in the restaurant earlier on, if he knew what was going on here, would be pretty worried. But he wouldn’t be worried about you. He wouldn’t give a damn about you. Your feelings just wouldn’t come into it.”

  “So if you don’t tell us what we need to know,” said Mr Occam, “and I have to hurt you, you’ll be suffering for another man who cares nothing for you. A man who denies that you are even capable of thinking and feeling.”

  “But he’d be wrong there wouldn’t he?” said Mr Thomas. “You do think, don’t you Heinz? You do feel. Mr Occam and I, we know that and, like I said before, we aren’t sadists, whatever you might think. We’d really rather not hurt a living thing who’s done nothing wrong at all.”

  Heinz looked from one to the other of his two interrogators.

  Help me God, he began to pray, but then stopped. How could he pray if he was a copy? What was he to God? God belonged to Karel Slade, laughing and joking in the restaurant with his pretty wife, not to this flimsy shadow, summoned out of nothingness by a machine.

  “So what will happen to me? When this is done, I mean.”

  “Well if you stop to think about it, Heinz, I think you’ll realise that we’re going to have to terminate you,” said Mr Thomas gently. “As you pointed out yourself, you can’t legally exist. And copies don’t last long anyway. A week or two at most. You’ll have to go. But it can be peaceful if you want it to be, quiet and peaceful and soon.”

  “Yeah,” said Mr Occam, “and think on this. If you act stubborn and we end up killing you the nasty way, well then we’ll just take that blood-clot guy out of the inducer there and start hurting him. And if he doesn’t play ball, well then we’ll take out that cloudy guy – he should be good and solid by then – and start on him. And if he plays the hero, well then, we’ll get a few more copies going that don’t even exist yet, and bring them alive just so they can suffer like you. But if you talk, well then they’re all on easy street. They can all stay in oblivion for good.”

  Mr Thomas touched a button on the Inducer and the lid slowly closed.

  *

  Back in the interrogation room, Heinz told them the codes and the names and the bank details. What were these things to him after all? He was no more responsible for them than a traveller at an airport was responsible for contraband slipped into his luggage when he was looking the other way.

  When Heinz was finally done, Mr Thomas went and fetched three cups of coffee from a machine in some other part of the building that Heinz would never see. He brought the three cups in on a little plastic tray, along with some little packets of cookies, and used his remote controller to release Heinz’s wrists from the shackles so he could hold his own cup and eat his own cookies. For a short time they all sipped peacefully in companionable, almost dreamy, silence, enjoying the warm surge of caffeine in their blood.

  But after a few minutes, with the sigh of a man reluctantly picking up a burden, Mr Thomas placed his half-empty cup on the floor, reached into his jacket and took out an automatic pistol with a long white silencer.

  Heinz felt no emotion. Less than twenty-four hours ago, after all, he’d been nothing but inanimate matter. He’d been a simple solution of minerals in a bath. Why fear a bullet that would simply return him to his natural state?

  “Hey! He needs to know the truth firs
t,” Mr Occam said. “He needs to know the truth before he dies. He should know who he is and the price he’s paid.”

  Mr Thomas sighed. Then, with a regretful grimace, he nodded.

  “Listen Heinz,” he said gently, lowering the gun. “Mr Occam is quite right. I’m afraid there’s one more thing we haven’t told you. One thing we haven’t been straight with you about. You see, it is true that we copied Karel Slade. It really is true. But here’s the thing. We lied to you when we said you were the copy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means,” said Mr Occam, “that you really are Karel Slade. We knocked you out with chloroform in your hotel room and brought you here.”

  Heinz remembered the hospital smell and the dream of being held down.

  “But… That can’t be. I mean… what about the restaurant? I mean we saw Karel Slade in the…”

  “He was a copy,” said Mr Thomas. “Though he doesn’t know that of course. He believes he’s the real Karel Slade.”

  “But…” Heinz – or Karel – struggled to frame a coherent question. “But why swap us round then? Why not just leave me in the hotel?”

  “Copies aren’t perfect. They always die after a week or two. Sometimes it’s a stroke or a heart attack. More often two or three body organs pack up all at once without warning. And copies have a way of just suddenly dying on us if we put too much pressure on them. Doing things this way round avoids that problem. And what’s more it gives us a way of eliminating Karel Slade the terrorist without blowing our cover. It’ll look as if he died of natural causes.”

  A small puzzle resolved itself in Karel’s mind.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes I see. Just like with Leon Schultz.”

  “Exactly. We copied him too. He told us everything he knew. The rest of you took the copy for the real man and never suspected anything. Your copy will die soon just like his did.”

  “He might die tonight, of a heart attack, in bed with that lovely wife of yours,” said Mr Occam, smiling coldly for the second time since Karel had met him.

  “James!” reprimanded Mr Thomas.

  Karel looked up. He’d barely been touched by Mr Occam’s jibe, but he was rather startled to discover that his tormentor had a first name.

  “What’s your given name?” he asked Mr Thomas.

  “Herbert,” said Mr Thomas, a little uncomfortably. He quickly formalised things again by prefacing the name with a title. “Agent Herbert Thomas.”

  Then he caught Karel’s eye and glanced down at the gun to remind Karel politely of their unfinished business. Karel nodded.

  “Give me one minute,” he said. “Just one minute.”

  “Of course,” said Mr Thomas. “You need to sort out who you are again. I understand that. Just let me know when you’re ready.”

  Transferring the gun to his left hand, he reached down for the remains of his cup of coffee.

  “Ever had that thing when you wake up in the morning and, just for a moment, you can’t think who you are?” he asked Mr Occam. “It’s a mystery, this identity thing. I never cease to be amazed how quickly we can persuade a man to part with it. It’s just…”

  Then he remembered that these were Karel’s final moments on Earth and he broke off, placing a finger on his lips with an apologetic glance at his prisoner.

  In the silence Karel bent forward in his execution chair and tried to pray.

  Dear God forgive me.

  But there was no sense of a presence listening to him. Well, of course not, he thought. He couldn’t really expect just to pick up the mantle of being Karel Slade again and expect to resume business as usual. Not after what he’d done. It didn’t work like that.

  Dear God forgive me, he tried again. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know who I was.

  The Marriage of Sea and Sky

  “They say,” mused Clancy, looking down on a planet whose entire surface glittered with artificial light, “that Metropolis is the city on which the sun never sets. It’s true in a literal sense because the city covers the whole planet. But it’s true in another sense too. Sunset never happens in Metropolis because there is no-one watching. The city’s inhabitants live inside absorbing worlds of their own construction. They have no attention to spare for that rather bare space under the sky which they call, dismissively, the surface.”

  Here he paused.

  “Have we finished dictation for now?” enquired Com.

  “Wait,” said Clancy.

  Com waited. Having no limbs, Com had no choice. Its smooth yellow egg-shape fitted comfortably into Clancy’s hand.

  “I am a writer and a traveller,” continued Clancy, reclining on cushions in a small dome-shaped room, its ceiling a hemisphere of stars. “I am a typical Metropolitan soul in many ways, restless, unable to settle, hungry for experience, hungry to feed the gap where love and meaning should be.”

  He considered.

  “No. Delete that last sentence. And I’ve had a change of heart about our destination. Instruct Sphere to head for the Aristotle Complex. There are several worlds out there which I’ve been meaning to check out.”

  Com gave Sphere its instructions in a three-microsecond burst of ultrasound.

  “Message received and implemented,” said Sphere to Com, in the same high-speed code. “Shall I send standard notification?”

  “Did you wish to notify anyone in the city about your new destination?” Com asked Clancy.

  “Hmm,” said Clancy, with an odd smile, “that’s an interesting question. And the answer, interestingly, is no. Take another note, Com, for the book.”

  He leant back with his hands behind his head.

  “Ten thousand kilometres out,” he dictated, “I changed my destination so that no one could find me if anything went wrong. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to dispense with the safety net, to get a sense of what it must have been like for those early settlers in the fourth millennium, setting out on their one-way journey into the unknown.”

  He considered, then shrugged.

  “Right Com. At this point add a chapter about the Aristotle Complex. What we know of the early settlers, their motives, their desire to escape from decadence… and so on. Themes: finality, no turning back, taking risks, a complete break with the past.”

  “Neo romantic style?”

  “Neo romantic with a small twist of hard-boiled. Oh and include three poetic sharp edge sentences. Just three. Low adjective count.”

  “Okay. Shall I read it through to you?” said Com, having composed a chapter of two thousand words without causing a gap in the conversation.

  “Not now,” said Clancy. “I’m not in the mood. Get me a dinner fixed will you, and something to watch on screen. How long will it be till we reach the Complex?”

  “The distance is about five parsecs. It’ll take three days.”

  *

  It was not the first voyage of this kind that Clancy had made. This was his career. He travelled alone to the ‘lost worlds’, he got to know them – their way of life, their myths, their beliefs – and then he returned with a book.

  Returning with the book was his particular trademark. The completed book went on sale, in electronic form, at the exact same moment that he stepped out of his sphere. It had become a publishing event. He sold a million within an hour and became for a while the city’s most talked-about celebrity: the literary spaceman: brave, elegant, utterly alone. He attended all the most fashionable parties. He invariably embarked on a love affair with at least one beautiful and brilliant woman.

  And when the love affair grew cold – as it always did, for there was a certain emptiness where his heart should be – and when he sensed that he had reached the end of the city’s fickle concentration span, he would go off once more into space.

  He had a fear of being trapped, of being tied down, of becoming ordinary.

  *

  “The first approach to a settled planet,” said Clancy, “is a uniquely humbling experience. Here are human being
s whose ancestors have gone about their lives without any reference to the universe outside for thirty generations. Invariably, in the absence of the vast pyramid of infrastructure on which modern society rests, their technology has become very basic. Invariably the story of their origins has been compacted into some legend. They have had more practical things to worry about for the last thousand years. My arrival, however it is managed, is inevitably a cultural bombshell. Their lives will never be the same again.”

  He considered. They had reached the Aristotle Complex an hour ago. Sphere was now using the shortcut of non-Euclidean space to leap from star to star and planet to planet, looking for inhabited worlds, very quickly but mechanically, like Com searching the Metropolitan Encyclopaedia for a single word.

  “Some say that for this reason I should not disturb them. This is surely poppycock. On that argument no human being would ever visit another’s home, no one would talk to another, let alone take the risk of love. Not that I ever do take that risk of course.”

  He frowned. “Delete that last sentence.”

  “Deleted. Sphere has found an inhabited planet.”

  *

  A fisher king was fishing in his watery world when the sphere came through the sky. Standing in the prow of his fine longboat, the tall, bearded upright king watched a silver ball, like a tiny, immaculate moon, descending towards his island home. And his household warriors, sitting at their oars, groaned and muttered, watching the sphere and then turning to look at him to see what he would do.

  Aware of their gaze and never once faltering as he played his hereditary role, he ordered them in a calm and confident voice to cut away the nets and row at once for the shore.

  *

  When Clancy emerged, his sphere perched on its tripod legs on the top of a tall headland, it was mainly women and children who were standing round him. Most of the men were out at sea.

  He smiled.

  “I won’t harm you,” he said, “I want to be your friend.”

  The words didn’t matter much of course. After all this time these fisher-people had evolved a completely new language. It was salty as seaweed, full of the sound of water.