The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  The Turing Test

  The Turing Test

  stories

  Chris Beckett

  This collection copyright © 2008 by Chris Beckett

  The Turing Test © 2002. Originally published in Interzone, October 2002. The Warrior Half-and-Half © 1995. Originally published in Interzone, December 1995. Monsters © 2003. Originally published in Interzone, February 2003. The Gates of Troy © 2000. Originally published in Interzone, April 2000. The Perimeter © 2005. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2005. Valour © 1999. Originally published in Interzone, March 1999. Snapshots of Apirania © 2000. Originally published in Interzone, October 2000. Piccadilly Circus © 2005. Originally published in Interzone. May/June, 2005. Jazamine in the Green Wood © 1994. Originally published in Interzone, August 1994. Dark Eden © 2006. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2006. We could be Sisters © 2004. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November, 2004. La Macchina © 1991. Originally published in Interzone, April 1991. Karel’s Prayer © 2006. Originally published in Interzone, September/October 2006. The Marriage of Sky and Sea © 2000. Originally published in Interzone, March 2000.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, rebound or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author and publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN number: 978-0-9553181-8-4

  Cover design by Eran Cantrell

  Cover layout by Dean Harkness

  Typeset by Andrew Hook

  Published by:

  Elastic Press

  85 Gertrude Road

  Norwich

  UK

  elasticpress@elasticpress.com

  www.elasticpress.com

  For my friends

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to David Pringle and Lee Montgomerie, formerly of Interzone, whose rejection letters 18 years ago were so detailed that they were almost a correspondence course and so encouraging that I kept on sending stories in. And to Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, Andy Cox, Jetse De Vries and not least Andrew Hook. The people who edit and publish magazines and anthologies, frequently for minimal reward, are the ones who make it possible for people like me to think of ourselves as writers. Which means a huge amount to us. For some strange reason.

  Table of contents

  The Turing Test

  The Warrior Half-and-Half

  Monsters

  The Gates of Troy

  The Perimeter

  Valour

  Snapshots of Apirania

  Piccadilly Circus

  Jazamine in the Green Wood

  Dark Eden

  We Could be Sisters

  La Macchina

  Karel’s Prayer

  The Marriage of Sky and Sea

  The Turing Test

  I can well remember the day I first encountered Ellie because it was a particularly awful one. I run a London gallery specialising in contemporary art, which means of course that I deal largely in human body parts, and it was the day we conceded a court case – and a very large sum of money – in connection with a piece entitled ‘Soul Sister’.

  You may have heard about it. We’d taken the piece from the up and coming ‘wild man of British art’, George Linderman. It was very well reviewed and we looked like making a good sale until it came out that George had obtained its main component – the severed head of an old woman – by bribing a technician at a medical school. Someone had recognised the head in the papers and, claiming to be related to its former owner, had demanded that it be returned to them for burial.

  All this had blown up some weeks previously. Seb, the gallery owner, and I had put out a statement saying that we didn’t defend George’s act, but that the piece itself was now a recognised work of art in the public domain and that we could not in conscience return it. We hired a top QC to fight our corner in court and he made an impressive start by demanding to know whether Michelangelo’s David should be broken up if it turned out that the marble it had been made from was stolen and that its rightful owner preferred it to be made into cement.

  But that Thursday morning the whole thing descended into farce when it emerged that the head’s relatives were also related to the QC’s wife. He decided to drop the case. Seb decided to pull the plug and we lost a couple of hundred grand in an out of court settlement to avoid a compensation claim for mental distress. Plus, of course we lost ‘Soul Sister’ itself to be interred in some cemetery somewhere, soon to be forgotten by all who had claimed to be so upset about it. What was it all, after all, once removed from the context of a gallery, but a half kilo of plasticised meat?

  That wasn’t the end of it either. I’d hardly got back from court when I got a call from one of our most important clients, the PR tycoon, Addison Parves. I’d sold him four ‘Limb Pieces’ by Rudy Slakoff for £15,000 each two weeks previously and they’d started to go off. The smell was intolerable, he said, and he wanted it fixed or his money back.

  So I phoned Rudy (he is arguably Linderman’s principal rival for the British wild man title) and asked him to either re-pickle the arms and legs in question or replace them. He was as usual aggressive and rude and told me (a) to fuck off, (b) that I was exactly the kind of bourgeois dilettante that he most hated – and (c) that he had quite deliberately made the limb pieces so that they would be subject to decay.

  “…I’m sick of this whole gallery thing – yeah, yours included Jessica – where people can happily look at shit and blood and dead meat and stuff, because it’s all safely distanced from them and sanitised behind glass or on nice little pedestals. Death smells, Jessica. Parves’d better get used to it. You’d better get used to it. I finished with Limb Pieces when Parves bought the fuckers. I’m not getting involved in this. Period.”

  He hung up leaving me fuming, partly because what he said was such obvious crap – and partly because I knew it was sort of true.

  Also, of course, I was upset because, having lost a fortune already that day, we stood to lose a further £60,000 and/or the good will of our second biggest client. Seb had been nice about the Soul Sister business – though I’d certainly been foolish to take it on trust from Linderman that the head had been legally obtained – but this was beginning to look like carelessness.

  I considered phoning Parves back and trying to persuade him that Rudy’s position was interesting and amusing and something he could live with. I decided against it. Parves hated being made to look a fool and would very quickly become menacing, I sensed, if he didn’t get his own way. So, steeling myself, I called Rudy instead and told him I’d give him an extra £10,000 if he’d take Limb Pieces back, preserve the flesh properly, and return them to Parves.

  “I thought you’d never ask!” he laughed, selling out at once and yet maddeningly somehow still retaining the moral high ground, his very absence of scruple making me feel tame and prissy and middle-class.

  I phoned Parves and told him the whole story. He was immensely amused.

  “Now there is a real artist, Jessica,” he told me. “A real artist.”

  He did not offer to contribute to the £10,000.

  *

  Nor was my grim day over even then. My gallery is in a subscriber area so, although there’s a lot of street life around it – wine bars, pavement cafes and so on – everyone there has been security vetted and you feel safe. I live in a subscriber area too, but I have to dr
ive across an open district to get home, which means I keep the car doors locked and check who’s lurking around when I stop at a red light. There’s been a spate of phoney squeegee merchants lately who smash your windows with crowbars and then drag you out to rob you or rape you at knifepoint. No one ever gets out of their car to help.

  That evening a whole section of road was closed off and the police had set up a diversion. (I gather some terrorists had been identified somewhere in there and the army was storming their house.) So I ended up sitting in a long tailback waiting to filter onto a road that was already full to capacity with its own regular traffic, anxiously eyeing the shadowy pedestrians out there under the street lights as I crawled towards the intersection. I hate being stationary in an open district. I hate the sense of menace. It was November, a wet November day. Every cheap little shop was an island of yellow electric light within which I got glimpses of strangers – people whose lives mine would never touch – conducting their strange transactions.

  What would they make of ‘Soul Sisters’ and ‘Limb Pieces’, I wondered? Did these people have any conception of art at all?

  A pedestrian stopped and turned towards me. I saw his tattooed face and his sunken eyes and my heart sank. But he was only crossing the road. As he squeezed between my car and the car in front he looked in at me, cowering down in my seat, and grinned toothlessly.

  *

  It was 7.30 by the time I got back, but Jeffrey still wasn’t home. I put myself through a quick shower and then retired gratefully to my study for the nourishment of my screen.

  My screen was my secret. It was what I loved best in all the world. Never mind art. Never mind Jeffrey. (Did I love him at all, really? Did he love me? Or had we simply both agreed to pretend?). My screen was intelligent and responsive and full of surprises, like good company. And yet unlike people it made no demands of me, it required no consideration and it was incapable of being disappointed or let down.

  It was expensive, needless to say. I rationalised the cost by saying to myself that I needed to be able to look at full-size 3D images for my work. And it’s true that it was useful for that. With my screen I could look at pieces from all around the world, seeing them full-size and from every angle; I could sit at home and tour a virtual copy of my gallery, trying out different arrangements of dried-blood sculptures and skinless torsos; I could even look at the gallery itself in real time, via the security cameras. Sometimes I sneaked a look at the exhibits as they were when no one was there to see them: the legs, the arms, the heads, waiting, motionless in that silent, empty space.

  But I didn’t really buy the screen for work. It was a treat for myself. Jeffrey wasn’t allowed to touch it. (He had his own playroom and his own computer, a high-spec but more or less conventional PC, on which he played his war games and fooled around in his chat-rooms.) My screen didn’t look like a computer at all. It was more like a huge canvass nearly two metres square, filling up a large part of a wall. I didn’t even have a desk in there, only a little side table next to my chair where I laid the specs and the gloves when I wasn’t using them.

  Both gloves and specs were wireless. The gloves were silk. The specs had the lightest of frames. When I put them on a rich 3D image filled the room and I was surrounded by a galaxy of possibilities which I could touch or summon at will. If I wanted to search the web or read mail or watch a movie, I would just speak or beckon and options would come rushing towards me. If I wanted to write, I could dictate and the words appeared – or, if I preferred it, I could move my fingers and a virtual keyboard would appear beneath them. And I had games there too, not so much games with scores and enemies to defeat – I’ve never much liked those – but intricate 3D worlds which I could explore and play in.

  I spent a lot of time with those games. Just how much time was a guilty secret that I tried to keep even from Jeffrey, and certainly from my friends and acquaintances in the art world. People like Rudy Slakoff despised computer fantasies as the very worse kind of cosy, safe escapism and the very opposite of what art is supposed to offer. With my head I agreed, but in my heart I loved those games too much to stop.

  (I had one called Night Street which I especially loved, full of shadowy figures, remote pools of electric light… I could spend hours in there. I loved the sense of lurking danger.)

  Anyway, tonight I was going to go for total immersion. But first I checked my mail, enjoying a recently installed conceit whereby each message was contained in a little virtual envelope which I could touch and open with my hands and let drop – when it would turn into a butterfly and flutter away.

  There was one from my mother, to be read later.

  Another was from Harry, my opposite number at the Manhattan branch of the gallery. He had a ‘sensational new piece’ by Jody Tranter. Reflexively I opened the attachment. The piece was a body lying on a bench, covered except for its torso by white cloth. Its belly had been opened by a deep incision right through the muscle wall – and into this gash was pressed the lens of an enormous microscope, itself nearly the size of a human being. It was as if the instrument was peering inside of its own accord.

  Powerful, I agreed. But I could reply to Harry another time.

  And then there was another message from a friend of mine called Terence. Well, I say a friend. He is an occasional client of the gallery who once got me drunk and persuaded me to go to bed with him: a sort of occupational hazard of sucking up to potential buyers, I persuaded myself at the time, being new to the business and anxious to get on, but there was something slightly repulsive about the man and he was at least twice my age. Afterwards I dreaded meeting him for a while, fearing that he was going to expect more, but I needn’t have worried. He had ticked me off his list and wanted nothing else from me apart from the right to introduce me to others, with a special, knowing inflection, as ‘a very dear friend’.

  So he wasn’t really a friend and actually it wasn’t really much of a message either, just an attachment and a note that said: ‘Have a look at this.’

  It was a big file. It took almost three minutes to download, and then I was left with a modest icon hovering in front of me labelled ‘Personal Assistant’.

  When I opened it a pretty young woman appeared in front of me and I thought at first that she was Terence’s latest ‘very dear friend’. But a caption appeared in a box in front of her:

  ‘In spite of appearances this is a computer-generated graphic.

  ‘You may alter the gender and appearance of your personal assistant to suit your own requirements.

  ‘Just ask!’

  “Hi,” she said, smiling, “my name’s Ellie, or it is at the moment anyway.”

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘You can of course change Ellie’s name now, or at any point in the future,’ said a new message in the box in front of her. ‘Just ask.’

  “What I am,” she told me, “is one of a new generation of virtual p.a.’s which at the moment you can only obtain as a gift from a friend. If it’s okay with you, I’ll take a few minutes to explain very briefly what I’m all about.”

  The animation was impressive. You could really believe that you were watching a real flesh and blood young woman.

  “The sort of tasks I can do,” she said, in a bright, private-school accent, “are sorting your files, drafting documents, managing your diary, answering your phone, setting up meetings, responding to mail messages, running domestic systems such as heating and lighting, undertaking web and telephone searches. I won’t bore you with all the details now but I really am as good a p.a. as you can get, virtual or otherwise, even if I say it myself. For one thing I’ve been designed to be very high-initiative. That means that I can make decisions – and that I don’t make the usual dumb mistakes.”

  She laughed.

  “I don’t promise never to make mistakes, mind you, but they won’t be dumb ones. I also have very sophisticated voice-tone and facial recognition features so I will learn very quickly to read your mood and to respond ac
cordingly. And because I am part of a large family of virtual p.a.’s dispersed through the net, I can, with your permission, maintain contact with others and learn from their experience as well as my own, effectively increasing my capacity by many hundreds of times. Apart from that, again with your permission, I am capable of identifying my own information and learning needs and can search the web routinely on my own behalf as well as on yours. That will allow me to get much smarter much quicker, and give you a really outstanding service. But even without any back-up I’m still as good as you get. I should add that in blind trials I pass the Turing Test in more than 99% of cases.”

  The box appeared in front of her again, this time with some options:

  ‘The Turing Test: its history and significance,’ it offered.

  ‘Details of the blind trials.

  ‘Hear more details about capacity.

  ‘Adjust the settings of your virtual p.a.’

  “Let’s… let’s have a look at these settings,” I said.

  “Yes, fine,” she said, “most people seem to want to start with that.”

  “How many other people have you met then?”

  “Me personally, none. I am a new free-standing p.a. and I’m already different from any of my predecessors as a result of interacting with you. But of course I am a copy of a p.a. used by your friend Terence Silverman, which in turn was copied from another p.a. used by a friend of his – and so on – so of course I have all that previous experience to draw on.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  A question occurred to me.

  “Does Terence know you’ve been copied to me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” replied Ellie. “He gave my precursor permission to use the web and to send mail in his name, and so she sent this copy to you.”