The Turing Test

by Chris Beckett

  “Well, it’s like this,” she said. “In the city, two worlds overlap: the physical universe and the consensual field. Every physical thing that stands or moves within the city is replicated in the copy of the city that forms the backdrop of the consensual field. That’s why you could see the hart in the city but not when it went beyond the perimeter. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Nope,” said Lemmy shortly with an indifferent shrug.

  “But how come it couldn’t seem to see me though?” he couldn’t help adding. “Not even in the city?”

  “Well, how could a wild animal see the consensual field? Animals don’t know that the consensual stuff is there at all. You and I might go into the city and see busy streets bustling with people, but to the deer the streets are empty. He can wander through them all day and meet no one at all except, once in a while, the occasional oddball like me.”

  Lemmy looked sharply at her.

  “Like you? You’re not a…?”

  The woman looked uncomfortable.

  “Yes, I’m a physical human being. An Outsider as you call us. But please don’t…”

  She broke off, touching his arm in mute appeal. Lemmy saw for an instant how lonely she was – and, having a kind heart, he felt pity. But simultaneously he wondered if he could run quickly enough to get away from her before she grabbed him.

  “Please don’t run off!” the old woman pleaded. “We’re just people, you know, just people who happen to still live and move in the physical world.”

  “So, you’re like the animal then?”

  “That’s it. There are a few of us. There only can be a few of us who are lucky enough and rich enough and old enough to have been able to…”

  “But how come you can see me then, if the animal couldn’t?”

  “I can see you because I have implants that allow me to see and hear and feel the consensual field.”

  Lemmy snorted.

  “So you have to have special help to see the real world!”

  She laughed, though not unkindly.

  “Well, some might say that the real world is that which is outside of the consensual field.” She pointed out beyond the orange lights. “Like those trees, like those low hills in the distance. Like the great muddy estuary over there to the east, like the cold sea…”

  She sighed.

  “I wish I could show you the sea.”

  “I’ve been to the sea loads of time.”

  “You’ve been to manufactured seas, perhaps, theme park seas, sea-like playgrounds. What I mean is the real sea which no one thinks about any more. It just exists out there, slopping around in its gigantic bowl all on its own. Nowadays it might as well be on some uninhabited planet going round some far off star. So might the forests and the mountains and the…”

  Lemmy laughed.

  “Things out there that no one can see? You’re kidding me.”

  The old woman studied his face.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “You can’t see the trees but if you listen, you will surely be able to hear them. Listen! It’s a windy night. The sensors will pick it up.”

  Lemmy listened. At first he couldn’t hear anything at all. He was about to laugh and tell the woman she was winding him up, but suddenly he became aware of a very faint sound which was new to him: a sighing sound, rising and falling, somewhere out there in the blankness. Sighing, sighing, sighing: he felt he could have listened to it for hours, that rising and falling sigh from a space that lay outside his universe.

  He wasn’t going to tell her that though.

  “Nope,” he said firmly. “I can’t hear nothing.”

  The woman smiled and touched his cheek.

  “I must say I like you,” she said. “Won’t you tell me your name and where you come from?”

  He looked at her for a moment, weighing up her request.

  “Lemmy,” he told her, with a small firm nod.

  What harm could she do him just by knowing his name?

  “I’m Lemmy Leonard,” he said, “I live down Dotlands way.”

  “Dotlands? My, that’s a long way to have come! That is half-way across London! Listen, Lemmy, my name is Clarissa Fall. My house is just over there.”

  She pointed to a big Victorian mansion, perhaps half a mile away to the east, just inside the perimeter, illuminated from below by a cold greenish light.

  “Why don’t you come back and have something to eat with me before you go back home?”

  He didn’t fancy it at all but it seemed cruel to turn her down. She was so lonely. (I suppose they must all be lonely, he thought. No one wants to talk to them, do they? No one wants to meet their eyes. People in the street even tell their kids to come away from them.)

  “Yeah alright,” he said. “Just for a bit.”

  *

  They came to Clarissa’s house through a formal garden, with geometrical beds of rose bushes and stone fountains in the shape of nymphs and gods that stood in dark, glittering ponds. Pathways wound through it, from one strange tableau to the next, illuminated by electric lights set into the ground.

  “The statues and the lights are physical,” Clarissa said, “but we had to get rid of the physical roses and the physical water. It was all getting too difficult to maintain. So the roses and the fountains you can see are just consensual. They’re part of the Field. If I switched off my implants, all that I would see here would be stone statues and concrete and ponds with nothing in them but mud and the skeletons of frogs.”

  She looked at Lemmy and sighed. The lights along the pathways had a cold greenish edge, like radiant ice.

  “And of course you wouldn’t be here with me any more, either,” she added.

  “What do you mean I wouldn’t be here? Where else would I be?”

  “Well… Well, I suppose that to yourself you would still seem to be here. It’s just that I wouldn’t be able to tell that you were here, like the deer couldn’t.”

  He could see she wanted to say something else but that she thought she shouldn’t. And then, in spite of herself, she said it anyway.

  “Well really the deer’s eyes didn’t deceive it,” she blurted out, “because really you aren’t here, you are…”

  “What do you mean I’m not bloody here?” demanded Lemmy hotly.

  She looked at him with a curious expression, both guilty and triumphant. It was as if she was pleased to have got a reaction of any sort from him. Like some lonely kid in a school playground who no one likes, Lemmy thought, winding you up on purpose just to prove to herself that she exists.

  They had come to Clarissa’s front door. Suddenly she turned to face him.

  “Don’t take any notice of what I said just now. Of course you’re here, Lemmy. Of course you are. You’re young, you’re alive, you’re full of curiosity and hope. You’re more here than I am, if the truth be told, far more here than I am.”

  She pushed open the door and they entered a cavernous hallway with a marble floor.

  “Is that you Clarissa?” came a querulous male voice.

  An old man came out of a side room, his face yellowy and crumpled, his body twisted and stooped, his shapeless jeans and white shirt seemingly tied round the middle with string – and yet, like Clarissa, so high-res that he made Lemmy feel almost like a Greytowner.

  “You’ve been out a long time,” the old man grumbled. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “Terence,” she told him, “this is Lemmy.”

  The old man frowned into the space that she had indicated.

  “Eh?”

  “This is Lemmy,” she repeated with that firm deliberate tone that people use when they are trying to remind others of things which really they should already know.

  “Implants,” she hissed at him when he still didn’t get the hint.

  The old man fumbled, muttering, at something behind his ear.

  “Oh God,” he sighed wearily, seeing Lemmy for the first time and immediately looking away. “Not again, Claris
sa. Not this all over again.”

  *

  Clarissa told Lemmy to go into the lounge.

  “Sit down and make yourself comfortable, dear. I’ll be with you in just a moment.”

  It was a high, long room lined with dark wooden panelling. On the walls hung big dark paintings of bowls of fruit, and dead pheasants, and horses, and stern, unsmiling faces. A fire, almost burnt out, smouldered under an enormous mantelpiece with a design of intertwining forest leaves carved heavily into its dead black wood.

  Lemmy sat himself awkwardly on a large dark-red sofa and waited, wishing he’d never agreed to come. Outside in the hallway the two old people were having a row.

  “Why shouldn’t I switch off these damned implants in my own house? Why shouldn’t I live in the real world without electronic enhancements? I don’t ask you to bring these ghosts back with you!”

  “Why can’t you face the fact that their world is the real world now Terence? They’re not the ghosts, we are!”

  “Oh yes? So how come they would all vanish without trace if someone were to only unplug the blessed…”

  “How come in twenty or thirty years time we’ll all be dead and forgotten, and they’ll still be here in their millions, living and loving, working and playing?”

  “That’s not the point and you know it. The point is that…”

  “Oh for God’s sake leave it, Terence. I’m not having this argument with you. I’m just not having this argument. I have a guest to attend to, as it so happens. In fact we have a guest. We have a guest and I expect you to treat him as such.”

  She came into the room to join Lemmy, forcing a smile over a face that was still agitated and flushed from the fight in the hallway.

  “Why don’t you have a chocolate bun?” she cried, much too brightly, indicating a plate of small cakes.

  Lemmy was ravenous and he reached out at once, but it was no good. He could touch the buns and feel them but he couldn’t move them any more than he could move a truck or a house.

  “Oh,” Clarissa said, “I’m sorry, I quite forgot.”

  Again? thought Lemmy, remembering how she had ‘forgotten’ earlier that he couldn’t see beyond the perimeter.

  “Never mind,” she said, leaping up and opening a cupboard in the corner of the room. “I always keep some of your kind of food here. I don’t often have visitors, but one never knows.”

  She came back to him with another plate of cakes. They were luridly colourful and so low-res that it was as if she had deliberately chosen them to contrast as much as possible with her own physical food, but Lemmy was hungry and he ate six of them, one after the other, while she sat and watched and smiled.

  “My. You were hungry.”

  “I came all the way from Dotlands,” Lemmy reminded her. “I ran quite a bit of it. And that animal didn’t go in a straight line, neither. It was this way and that way and round and round.”

  She laughed and nodded. Then, as she had done before, she started to say something, stopped, and then said it anyway. It seemed to be a pattern of hers. But when you were alone a lot, perhaps you forgot the trick of holding things in?

  “Do you know how that food of yours works?” she asked Lemmy. “Do you know how it fills you up?”

  Lemmy didn’t have time to reply.

  “Every bite you take,” she told him, “a computer sends out a signal and far away, a series of signals are sent to your olfactory centres and a small amount of nutrients are injected into the bloodstream of your…”

  Lemmy frowned.

  “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “Doing what, dear?” She assumed an expression of utter, childlike innocence, but the pretence was as fragile as fine glass.

  “Trying to make me feel bad.”

  “What do you mean, Lemmy dear? Why on earth do you think I’m trying to make you…”

  Then she broke off, ran her hands over her face as if to wipe away her falsely sincere expression and for a little while fell silent, looking into the almost burnt-out fire.

  “It’s jealousy I suppose,” she said at length. “It’s just plain jealousy. I envy you the bustle and banter of Dotlands. I envy you the life of the city. All my true friends are dead. There are only a few hundred of us Outsiders left in London and most of us can’t stand the sight of each other after all this time. We can’t have children you know, that was part of the deal when they let us stay outside. We had to be sterile. Of course we’re all too old now anyway.”

  She gave the weary sigh of one for whom sorrow itself has grown tedious, like a grey old sky that will not lift.

  “And out in the streets, well, you know yourself what it’s like… You were unusual in that you didn’t run as soon as you discovered what I was, or jeer at me, or get all your friends to come and laugh at me and call me a spook. That was good of you. And look how this stupid old woman shows her gratitude!”

  Suddenly she picked up the plate of real physical chocolate buns, strode with them to the fire and emptied them into it. Pale flames – yellow and blue – rose up to devour the greased paper cups.

  Then, for a time, they were both silent.

  “Do you know that Mr Howard?” asked Lemmy at length. “The one who owns all that property down in Grey Town.”

  “Richard Howard? Know him? I was married to him for five years!”

  “Married? To Mr Howard? You’re kidding!”

  “Not kidding at all,” said Clarissa, smiling. “Mind you, most of us survivors have been married to one another at some point or another. There are only so many permutations for us to play with.”

  “So what’s he like?”

  “Richard Howard? Well he never washes, that’s one thing about him,” Clarissa said with a grimace. “He smells to high heaven.”

  “Smells?” said her husband. “Who smells? Who are you talking about?”

  The old man had come into the room while they were talking and now he began rummaging noisily through a pile of papers on a dresser behind them, shuffling and snuffling, determined that his presence should not be overlooked.

  “I still don’t get where that white animal went,” Lemmy said, “and why I couldn’t follow it.”

  “White animal?” demanded the old man crossly, turning from his papers to address his wife. “What white animal was that?”

  “It was a white hart,” she told him, “an albino, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes, and how did he get to see it?”

  “Well, it must have got in through one of those holes in the wildlife fence.”

  “Well, well,” chuckled the old man. “One of those dratted holes again, eh? The Council is slipping up. All these great big holes appearing overnight in the fence!”

  Puzzled, Lemmy looked at Clarissa and saw her positively cringing under her husband’s scorn. But she refused to be silenced.

  “Yes,” she went on, in an exaggeratedly casual tone, “and, according to Lemmy here, it wandered right down as far as Dotlands. He followed it back up to try and find out where it came from. Then it went over the perimeter and he couldn’t follow it any further. But Lemmy doesn’t…” she broke off to try and find a more tactful form of words, “he doesn’t understand where it’s got to.”

  “Well of course not,” the old man grumbled. “They aren’t honest with these people. They don’t tell them what they really are or what’s really going on. They…”

  “Well, what is really going on?” Lemmy interrupted him.

  “What’s really going on?” Terence gave a little humourless bark of laughter. “Well, I could show him if he wants to see. I could fetch the camera and show him.”

  “Terence, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” began Clarissa weakly, but her objection was half-hearted and he was already back at the capacious dresser, rummaging in a drawer.

  He produced a video camera and some cables which he plugged into the back of the TV in the corner. Part of the mantelpiece appeared on the screen, blurred and greatly magnified. Terence
took out one of those glass disc contraptions that Clarissa also had and placed it in front of his eyes. (It was held in place, Lemmy noticed, by hooks over his ears.) He made some adjustments. The view zoomed back and came into focus.

  There was nothing remarkable about it. It was just the room they were sitting in. But when Terence moved the camera, something appeared on the screen that wasn’t visible in the room itself – a silver sphere, somewhat larger than a football, suspended from the middle of the ceiling.

  “What’s that?” Lemmy asked.

  “That’s a sensor,” the old man said, answering him, but looking at his wife. “Damn things. We have to have them in every single room in the house. Legal requirement. Part of the penalty for living inside the perimeter.”

  “But what is it? And why can’t I see it except on the TV?”

  “He doesn’t know what a sensor is?” growled Terence. “Dear God! What do they teach these people?”

  “It’s not his fault, dear,” said Clarissa gently.

  “Yeah it is, actually,” said Lemmy cheerfully. “I don’t never go to school.”

  Amused in spite of himself, the old man snorted.

  “It’s like I was telling you earlier, dear,” Clarissa said to Lemmy. “Sensors are the things that monitor the physical world and transmit the information to the consensual field...”

  “…which superimposes whatever tawdry rubbish it wants over it,” grumbled the old man, “like… like those ridiculous coloured air-cakes.”

  He meant the low-res cakes that Clarissa had put out on the table for Lemmy. And now Lemmy discovered a disturbing discrepancy. Within the room he could see the plate on the table with three cakes on it still left over from the nine she had brought in for him. But on the TV screen, though the table and the plate were clearly visible, the plate was empty and there were no cakes at all.

  “Why can’t I see the cakes on the TV? Why can’t I see the sensor in the room?”

  “The cakes are consensual. The sensor is physical,” Terence said without looking at him. “A sensor detects everything but itself, just like the human brain. It feeds the Field with information about the physical world but it doesn’t appear in the Field itself, not visually, not in tactile form. Nothing.”