Turing Test

by E. M. Foner

  “Trust me,” I told her. “Once the word gets out, everybody will be playing the video on their phones.”

  “You know what?” eBeth said. “You shouldn’t even bother with the other languages. Just do it in English and let everybody else translate for themselves. They’re all used to it by now.”

  “Sue?”

  “I think non-English-speaking humans will appreciate it if you make an effort. Besides, you insisted on learning all of those languages when we arrived.”

  “I like languages. You’re outvoted, eBeth. I need to hop over to Library to update them on our portal opening plan and then I’ll head to Paul’s garage and do the speech.”

  “I’m driving,” the girl announced, coming off the couch. “I’ll make Spot sit in the back so you can sit in the front, Sue.”

  “That’s alright,” my second-in-command said. “I’m going to stay here and update my client histories for Lilly.”

  “Chicken,” I muttered in Sue’s ear, as I followed eBeth and Spot out of the apartment.

  After we arrived at the restaurant, it only took me a few seconds on Library to check with the engineers and confirm that the portals could be paired as Sue had described. The lead engineer gave me a kill-code for in case something went terribly wrong, and then I stepped back through the portal into my basement office. eBeth was holding Spot by the collar.

  “He tried to follow you again,” she said.

  “Bad boy,” I scolded him. “Library doesn’t have an atmosphere. You don’t want to know what that would do to your body.” The dog hung his head and tried to look guilty, but I could tell that he really thought I was holding out on him. “All right, you didn’t mean anything by it,” I said, and then gave him a treat from the desk.

  “This is exactly why he ignores you,” eBeth lectured me. “You give him treats even when he does the opposite of what you tell him. How is he ever going to learn?”

  “I do the same with you,” I retorted, but only under my breath and after she had already left the office. Spot shot me a sympathetic look before following.

  I double-checked that the door had locked itself as we left the restaurant, and got into the back of the minivan. eBeth started pulling out of the lot before I even got the door slid shut.

  “What’s Paul going to use for a background?” she asked.

  “The wall, I guess. I’m just going to sit at his desk.”

  “In his tiny office? The one with all the free calendars of women in bikinis posing with mufflers and ratchet wrenches?”

  “That just means a little extra video processing,” I told her, though the truth was I hadn’t thought about a background. “I’ll fix it all after he shoots.”

  “Did you bring a printed copy of the speech?”

  “What for? You know I have a perfect memory.”

  “As a prop. It will make the whole thing more official.”

  “Don’t make this more complicated than it has to be,” I told her. “Just because you were right about Sue—”

  “And Stacey von Hoffman,” she interrupted.

  “What about Stacey?”

  “You don’t know that she and Justin are together?”

  “Of course I knew,” I said. Lying to eBeth and Sue was getting to be a bad habit. I gambled on extrapolating where this was heading and added, “I knew about Paul and Helen too.”

  “Idiot,” she said. “Paul has been dating Kim for over a year, she even made that alcohol simulation thing for him. Helen is in a long-distance relationship with some AI whose name doesn’t translate into English.”

  “Oh. Is there anything I should know about Spot?”

  “Ask him yourself. You’re the one who—” eBeth interrupted herself and swerved away from the entrance to Paul’s garage lot at the last second.

  “What was that?”

  “Death Lord’s Jeep is there. I didn’t think he ever got up this early.”

  “So?”

  “Look at what I’m wearing!”

  “You look fine to me.”

  “I’m just stopping home first. This will only take a minute.”

  “It will take a half an hour,” I complained. “Ten minutes to get home, ten minutes for you to struggle into less comfortable clothes, and ten minutes to get back.”

  “I’ll speed,” she offered, putting her words into action. Spot whimpered and grabbed the shoulder belt buckle in his mouth. Why he didn’t just belt up every time he got in the van was beyond me.

  “Stop!” I told her. “Drop me and Spot off, go get changed, and come back. We’ll be done shooting by then.”

  “But I have to supervise. Sue made me promise.”

  “Then come and let Death Lord see how you normally look in the morning when you aren’t in painting clothes. He was going to find out sooner or later anyway.”

  “I was hoping for later,” eBeth grumbled, but she did an illegal U-turn and headed back to the garage.

  Brutus put on his usual macho show when we pulled into the parking lot, but Spot ignored his larger friend as if he considered the whole thing rather puppyish. Then a jogger went by the garage and both dogs threw themselves at the chain link fence, growling and snapping like they suspected the poor woman of stealing scrap from the junk pile.

  “Hey, eBeth,” a lanky young man with acne scars greeted us, ignoring me entirely. “I didn’t know you got up so early.”

  “It’s past 9:00 AM,” I said. “What’s with you kids and sleeping late?”

  “Don’t mind Mark,” eBeth told him. “He’s just nervous because he has to address the world and stuff.”

  “Does that mean we’ll be able to go four-wheeling during the daytime?” Death Lord asked.

  “Just remember to say that some alien out at the old mall sold you the aftermarket parts if you get caught,” Paul reminded him. “I cleaned up my office, Mark. Let’s do this thing so I can get back to getting the place ready for sale.”

  “Looks like I’m going to be the last one to activate my exit plan,” I told him. “The sad thing is that I never found another technician in town who I’d trust with my customers.”

  “Can’t you just swap out their hardware with alien stuff that will never fail like you did for eBeth?” Death Lord asked.

  “We’ve decided not to keep secrets from each other,” eBeth told me proudly. Then she qualified the statement. “At least not your secrets.”

  “I’ve gathered as much,” I said. “I’d do that, Death Lord, but the problem is always the software.”

  “You should get the program my junior high school used. At the end of every day, the teacher could reset the computer back to the way it was in the morning.”

  “It doesn’t work outside of schools because people want to save the work they do each day.”

  “Bummer.”

  We all crowded into the tiny office which Paul really had cleaned up. All of the pin-up girls were gone from the walls, which had been painted in the exact same shade of white that Justin used in his independent living facility. Paul had even found a large piece of plate glass to put over the desktop. There was the same beat-up old chair with duct tape repairs, but nobody would be able to see that while I was sitting. I took my place, hoping nothing would stick to the back of my suit, and eBeth found an airbag recall notice I could hold as if it were a speech.

  “Who has the video camera?” she asked.

  “I’ll just record it through my eyes and send it to Mark,” Paul told her. “It’s a shame I couldn’t have a Hammerhead shark encounter suit because the eyes are far enough apart to synthesize a decent 3D production. All set.”

  I rattled off the speech eBeth and Sue had agreed upon, adding an explanation of how the luxury demonstration package would link pairs of portals for instantaneous jumping around Earth. Paul sent me the file and I ran the filter to alter my face and voice just enough so that it wasn’t obviously me. Then I passed it back so he could push it out to the satellite networks while I took a few seconds to dub a
nd lip sync the 190 non-American languages from the international standards organization codes, then uploaded them all to YouTube. On a whim, I hacked the hundred most popular Twitter accounts and tweeted the URLs with the message, “Check out this cool video from The League of Sentient Entities Regulating Space.”

  Nineteen

  I felt genuinely sad as I walked out the door of Harrison’s Dental for the last time. It took me almost fifteen minutes to convince Mrs. Harrison that my leaving wasn’t due to her future son-in-law’s rearrangement of their desktop icons, and in the end, I had to lie and say that I was moving to Australia.

  There was a delivery truck in the parking lot blocking the view of my van as I exited the building. I walked around the truck and jerked to a sudden halt when I saw the Hanker leaning against my fender, smoking a cigarette in a long holder.

  “Hey, Killer,” the alien greeted me.

  “Pffift! Are you nuts? If the humans see you they’ll call a zookeeper—or S.W.A.T.”

  “I’m cloaked, buddy. You can’t tell? It’s a fun piece of old tech from our museum that I’m trying out.”

  “I’m always running millimeter wave scans, so, no, I didn’t notice that you were invisible.”

  “Just as well,” the Hanker said. “The humans can’t see me but the cloak is powered by my metabolism and I can’t run it for more than an hour or so before starving or dehydrating. Let me into the back of your van.” He paused a moment to read the custom magnetic sign stuck on the side. “If It Breaks Service – www.ifitbreaks.com. No phone number?”

  “It’s on the website. I’ve been teaching a young human to drive and I was getting too many calls when the number was on the sign.”

  I bleeped the door open with the key fob and Pffift clambered in, taking the spot that was usually mine when eBeth and Spot were up front. Then I went around and got in the driver’s seat before turning to give the alien a hard stare.

  “What do you want, Pffift?”

  “Come on, we’re old friends, Mark. Did I pronounce your human name all right?”

  “It will do. How does fighting on opposite sides of a war make us friends?”

  “Are you still calling that little fertilizer glitch a war? It’s not my fault that the AI decided to ignore the manufacturer’s recommendations. I just delivered the stuff.”

  “And you left with a shipload of discounted timber and a promise to keep your mouth shut, which you failed to honor.”

  “I never breathed a word about it to anybody except my wife,” Pffift protested. “You know that spouses don’t count in secrecy pledges. You can check our bylaws.”

  “You were married to an investigative journalist at the time.”

  “She got the facts right, didn’t she? Hey, can you really drive this thing? I tried taking one of the community cars from the garage downtown but it must have been defective. I barely scraped a wall and I almost got launched into the backseat by an inflating bag, and that’s not to mention the shrapnel. If my personal shield hadn’t activated I would have picked up a few holes. And I wasn’t even going that fast.”

  “The airbags have been recalled but it’s taking forever,” I told him, pulling out of the parking lot. “You want me to drop you back at the mall?”

  “No, we need to talk in private. How about your place?”

  I was tempted to just throw him out of the van and let his cloak eat through his energy reserves, but I suspected that Sue would want to see him, so I headed back to the apartment.

  “What is there to talk about, Pffift? You ran your con on the humans and they fell for it hook, line and sinker. I’m here to build them up, not tear them down.”

  “They’re already trying to get out of the contract,” he told me. “Our emissary swears he’s going to eat the next lawyer who comes knocking at the mall. And one of those human geniuses actually burned the contract to ashes and claimed it doesn’t exist. Don’t they realize that recorded images are better than the originals?”

  “Not on this world,” I told him. “Did you use carbon paper?”

  “What’s that?”

  After I explained the basic principle, we spent the rest of the drive home discussing the commercial opportunities for carbon paper in the greater galaxy. Pffift was convinced it would sell like parchment on mage worlds, where technology was frowned upon, if not outright banned. Given the amount of scribal work that goes into running any sort of magical enterprise, it wasn’t surprising that a big chunk of their overhead went into copying.

  “The only sticking point is that you can’t just tell scribes to push down harder on their quills,” Pffift said, apparently unaware of the irony of his word choice in English. Accelerated language learning is like that sometimes. “If we can get the mages to accept ballpoint pens we’ll have it made in the shade, but that might be too much for them to—Watch it!”

  “Don’t be so jumpy, Pffift. They all drive like this.”

  “Trying to read their personal communication devices when they should be looking where they’re going?”

  “Just relax, we’re almost there.” I tried to strike a confidential tone and said, “Tell me something, Pffift. Have you ever heard of Bitcoin?”

  “Yes, and I don’t want to buy any from you. Look, Mark. I know we played a bit of a dirty trick by pitching the humans when your job here was almost finished, but you don’t know the whole story. We didn’t come here with the intention of pranking them.”

  “You did a pretty good job of it.”

  “Hey, they practically begged for it. You wouldn’t believe all the ‘Take us with you and do what you want with the rest of these cretins,’ offers we were getting over microwave links before we even landed. What I’m saying is that this world is just the tip of the iceberg that sank the Titanic.”

  “Was that an attempt at a movie analogy? I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Movies are one of the few things these people actually do well, and even then, nine out of ten are unwatchable. Why do they insist on making so many bad ones? Is it all some kind of accounting trick or tax dodge? They must know that the scripts are terrible before they begin production.”

  “It’s a mystery,” I told him, pulling up in front of my squat apartment block.

  Pffift stared out the windshield. “You really live in this pile of—”

  “Don’t say it. It’s part of my cover and I get subsidized rent. They even pay for the garbage pick-up, something your people wouldn’t know anything about. Now turn your shield back on. The neighbors don’t know that I’m an alien artificial intelligence.”

  “Observers,” the Hanker grumbled. “There’s not enough gold in the galaxy to tempt me into doing your job.”

  Pffift followed me up to the apartment, muttering to himself the whole way, but I refused to answer until we got inside. eBeth was on the couch playing a game, and Sue was in the process of replacing all of the stock photographs on the walls with prints of the two of us together that she must have gotten the other team members to send her from their memories. The place did look a bit homier. Spot lifted his head from eBeth’s lap and growled at the cloaked alien, who threw himself on the floor.

  “Forgive me, oh, Archmage of Eniniac,” the Hanker blubbered in his native tongue. “I didn’t know you were friendly with the humans. Take my life but please spare my family banking records.”

  “That’s Spot, my dog,” I told Pffift in his own language. “Don’t uncloak until I prepare the human for your appearance.”

  “But he looks exactly like—”

  “Who’s talking?” eBeth interrupted, putting more effort into checking every direction than she ever did when pulling away from the curb. “What language was that?”

  “Hanker,” I told her. “His name is Pffift and he’s going to uncloak in a moment, so brace yourself.”

  “I like giant pandas,” eBeth said. “They’re cute.”

  “He’s here in his natural form,” Sue explained, moving forward to greet the Hanker. “Hello,
Pffift. How’s your wife?”

  “Which wife?”

  “One thing at a time,” I begged them. “Don’t be surprised by his appearance, eBeth. He’s going to look a little like a scaly rooster with fangs and antlers. Alright, Pffift.”

  The Hanker uncloaked and eBeth actually gave a short scream as she scrambled over the couch to the other side. “That is NOT a scaly rooster,” she croaked.

  “With a different head and lots of loose folds of skin,” I added. “Just give yourself a minute to get used to him.”

  “Sorry,” Pffift said in English. “We come in peace.”

  “Oh, so that makes looking like a nightmare all right,” the girl shot back.

  “Come on, eBeth,” Sue coaxed her. “You’re always saying how you want to travel the galaxy, but most aliens are going to look even more foreign to you than Pffift.”

  “I know, I see them through the portal all the time,” eBeth said. “It’s different when they’re a few feet away looking like they’re about to pounce.”

  “He was just, uh, greeting Spot,” I explained. “Stand up, Pffift.”

  The Hanker rose to his feet, still looking nervously in Spot’s direction. The dog yawned. eBeth peeked over the back of the couch, immediately looked away, and then conquered her fear long enough to study the alien.

  “Where are your manners?” Sue demanded of me. “Give him a chair. Can I get you something to drink, Pffift?”

  “Our emissary brought back a delicious drink from Davos. You make it with little bags of dried leaves steeped in boiling water, but going by the neighborhood you live in, I would guess that it’s beyond your means.”

  “Tea,” Sue said, heading into the kitchen. “I’ll pick one out. Anything for you, eBeth?”

  “Chamomile, and put a shot of Mark’s forgetfulness drug in mine.”

  “It only starts working after you take it,” I reminded her. “I’ve seen you kill game monsters that looked much nastier than Pffift.”

  “Hey!” the Hanker said. “I’m standing right here.”

  “I don’t think I have a chair that will suit you, but you can sit on the couch,” I offered.