Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“Come and get my boots off!” he bellowed. “One of you lazy bastards come down and take off my boots.”

And then I heard him outside the door of my room abusing some servant or other who was patiently helping him along the corridor.

“Watch out, you clumsy oaf! Can’t you at least look where you’re going?”

He still hadn’t emerged when I left in the morning for the Metropolis.

“Wow!” breathed my friend Hannibal, as we drew up beside the Croesus. “That’s not a yacht, it’s a bloody ship!”

I laughed. Shiny and sleek, Dad’s motor yacht dwarfed the boats moored either side, though they themselves were big by most people’s reckoning, and cost more than an average human being earns in a lifetime.

I led the way up the gangplank. Han followed (and behind Han, the chauffeur carrying our bags.) I smiled a little wearily as Han let out various exclamations of amazement. This kind of reaction – to the Croesus, to the houses, to the cars and planes and helicopters – has become tedious over the years. But of course this was a new world to Han, a world of almost godlike opulence, even though by most people’s reckoning Han’s family is far from poor.

For myself, when I look at the Croesus, I feel oppressed by the scale and flamboyance of the thing, as if it required of me that I too should be extravagant and larger than life, like Dad.

“Mehmet!” I called.

Wiry, white-haired, leathery with sun, the Croesus’ faithful crewman emerged smiling from within. His whole working life has been given over to the care of the Croesus and its four predecessors, and to my father, who he adores.

“Master Alex! How nice to see you, sir. You have finished at school now, I understand?”

“Nice to see you too Mehmet.” (The chauffeur put down the bags and disappeared). “This is my school friend Hannibal. Yes, school’s out for good. It feels great!”

Actually it felt very frightening, but one didn’t say that.

“Well, we are ready to leave as soon as you want.”

“Great. We’ll just settle in, and then let’s be off.”

“That was extraordinary !” enthused Han as I showed him his cabin.

“What was?”

“You just had a conversation in, what, Turkish?”

“Albanian actually.” I sighed, “I’m sure I told you about my language splice didn’t I?”

“I guess I didn’t quite…”

The fact was that I hadn’t had a conversation in Albanian at all. I had had a conversation in English. The language splice intercepted what Mehmet said in Albanian while it was still a signal in my auditory nerves and translated it for me. I replied in English, but the splice again intercepted the nerve signals going to my vocal cords and substituted the Albanian which actually came out of my mouth. The thing did this fluently with several hundred languages, and – because it knew examples of every language family from Indo-European to Uto-Aztecan – it would have a competent stab at any language at all, learning a new one properly in a day or two.

So when I listened, I only ever heard English. I could hear other languages as background noise, but as soon as I paid attention, they turned into English. It was my father’s answer to my expressing an interest in studying languages at University.

“Waste of time, Alex, complete waste of time. No-one needs to study languages now.”

My objections were dismissed as mere funk and the splice was put in under a local anaesthetic.

It was the same with history when I expressed an interest in that. Ask me a question about history, any question at all! The President of Latvia in 1988? Gorbunov. The death of Constantine the Great? 337 c.e. You see I don’t even have to think about it.

A pity really.

An hour later I was steering the Croesus out to sea through a white forest of sailing yachts, tactfully assisted by Mehmet. Han had a go too when we were out in open water. Then we let Mehmet take over.

He headed for Corsica. We wandered up to the fore deck, stripped down to swimming trunks, opened some beers, rolled up the first of many joints and congratulated ourselves on being free.

Giving me the use of the Croesus for the summer was Dad’s leaving-school present.

“Go where you like, take who you like. Have an adventure on me!” he’d said.

I know exactly what he had in mind: me and two or three red-blooded scions of the billionaire classes taking the Mediterranean watering holes by storm, seducing beautiful young women, shinning up drain-pipes, getting into scrapes. His disappointment was obvious when I chose as my sole companion a mere doctor’s son, tongue-tied with awe in his presence, who’d only started at my school a couple of terms previously.

“At least reassure me you two are not a pair of fags,” he grumbled.

“No, we’re not!” I exclaimed, reddening.

But in fact there was a little of that in the air.

We had a division of labour. Mehmet navigated, refuelled, negotiated with harbourmasters, cooked, maintained the toilets, did the shopping and sluiced down the deck. Han and I took the odd turn at the wheel.

We went from Corsica to Sardinia, on to Sicily and Crete, and then north to meander between the Aegean islands. Sometimes we anchored off beaches and had a swim, or went ashore and explored the prettier towns. We avoided the big marinas and the gathering places of the rich. We made no serious attempt to meet people. And we talked a lot, Han and I, often about the lives that lay ahead of us and all the constraints and difficulties that put our dreams outside our reach.

“I’m going to medical school because that’s always been the case,” Han said. “My dad scraped and struggled his way into medical school from the gutters of Beirut. He’d prepared a niche for his son before his son was even born, and it hasn’t occurred to him for one second to wonder whether his son might have plans of his own. Actually I hate sick people and the sight of blood makes me throw up.”

“Tell me about it! With me it’s like every time I express an interest in anything Dad gets it for me instantly. So it ceases to be an aspiration, ceases to be something to aim for. People think I’m being indulged, but actually I’m being fobbed off…”

And so on. We laughed a lot and touched each other a lot in what was ostensibly a brotherly horsing-around sort of way. But sometimes the eye contact lingered and was hard to break. I found myself noticing how good-looking Hannibal was with those dark Levantine eyes and how close we were, and he was clearly thinking similar sorts of things. He even tried to speak about it.

“You know Alex, you really are the only real friend I’ve ever had in my life. I feel I can talk to you about…”

But there was a boundary still and I drew back when he seemed to draw too close to it.

“It’s this puff mate. It’s good stuff. It makes everything seem like a revelation.”

We were a bit in love with each other, but homosexuality was not a territory where I would feel at home.

Mehmet kept carefully out of our way.

We were off the Aegean coast of Turkey, moving towards the Dardanelles, when the helicopter appeared in the distance.

“Looks like one of Dad’s,” I observed idly and began rolling another joint.

When Han passed the joint back to me to finish it off, I looked round again at the helicopter which was much nearer now: nearly overhead.

“Jesus, it is Dad’s!” I exclaimed, leaping convulsively to my feet and tossing the remains of the joint guiltily into the sea.

Han laughed disbelievingly. But then the helicopter was hovering overhead, a door was opening and a figure was being winched down towards us.