Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“It’s your father, Master Alex!” exclaimed Mehmet, rushing excitedly up on deck after speaking to the helicopter on the radio.

I was less enchanted.

“What the fuck does he think he’s doing!”

But then Dad was on the fore deck, unbuckling his harness: big, bronzed, beaming, radiant with energy and health.

“I thought I’d pay you boys a visit!”

Mehmet, who worships Dad, rushed forward and so did well brought-up Han, but my father held up a restraining hand.

“Just a minute. I’ve got a little surprise for you!”

The winch cable had gone up and now came down again with a large oblong package in a sling.

We helped to remove it. At a wave from Dad, the winch went up again and the helicopter left.

“Right then,” my father said, “now I need a drink.”

Mehmet hurried to oblige and we went down to the back of the yacht to sit in the shade of the canopy.

“So what have you been up to?” Dad asked.

Han, all stumbling and deferential and addressing him as ‘sir’, began to describe our route so far in boring detail. I interrupted to tell Dad about the highlights: the school of dolphins off the coast of Malta, the sunset over a tiny Sardinian cove, the octopus speared by a fisherman in Crete, its tentacles pulling and tugging at his trident just like a child being tickled, trying to pull the big fingers away… I knew Dad wouldn’t be interested. I knew his eyes would glaze over in a matter of seconds. But he’d asked the question and I was damned if I was going to let him get away without waiting for me to answer.

“Nothing much then,” was how he summed up when I’d finished. “That’s what I thought. Well, I knew you could do with a bit of excitement so I brought you this.”

He indicated the mysterious oblong, still wrapped in the canvas bag it had worn in the sling, then called out to Mehmet.

“Mehmet, old friend, you come and look at this too. It’s the future of yachting!”

Incidentally, he spoke to Mehmet in English and Mehmet spoke English in reply. Dad always spoke English. (If absolutely necessary he carried a pocket translator). I once asked him why he hadn’t had a language splice put in like me, if he thought they were such a good idea.

“Over the hill, I’m afraid, Al. The docs tell me it’s a bad move at my age. If splice technology had been around when I was younger I would have gone for it like a shot.”

But I doubt that very much. I can’t imagine my father accepting anything inside his head that was made by another human being. He is, as they say, a self made man.

Anyway. The package.

Even when it was out of its bag, we were none the wiser. It was a white rectangular object with a set of controls and a display panel located roughly in the middle. There was also a suitcase-shaped box stuffed in with it into the canvas bag.

Dad was delighted by our expressions of incomprehension.

“No idea?” he asked. “Well, you’ll certainly never guess. It’s a temporal navigator, no less. A time machine!”

We all gasped. There are, after all, only a few such things in the world.

“That’s worth more than the GNP of a medium sized country,” exclaimed Han in a breathless semi-whisper, when my father had gone for piss. “And your Dad calmly lowers it from a helicopter onto a boat!”

I was irritated by his star-struck awe. He knew my feelings about my father. He’d listened, he’d sympathised. But when it came to it, he was just as gibbering and servile as everyone else in my father’s actual presence, bowled over by his wealth and fame, and by the child-like egocentrism that came with it.

“Now I defy you to have a boring time with this , Alex,” Dad said, settling back into his chair. “The Roman Empire. The Ancient Egyptians. Moses. You can go back five thousand years if you want to!”

“That’s wonderful, sir,” Han gushed, “I just can’t get it through my head that this is a real temporal navigator. I mean you hear about these things but you don’t expect to actually go back in time yourself. Wow! Unbelievable!”

He cast around for intelligent questions.

“I’ve… I’ve never quite gathered why people always use these at sea?”

“Because when you travel back you take a few hundred tonnes of the surrounding matter with you,” Dad said, “Not too awkward if it’s just water, but rather difficult on land. And on land you’d run rather a risk of materialising slap in the middle of a building or something.”

“But isn’t the planet in a different position anyway? I mean what with rotation and going round the sun and the sun itself, you know, going round the galaxy…”

Dad shrugged vaguely and looked away, as he did when irritated by pettifogging details.

“They say it is the ultimate yachting accessory,” murmured Mehmet, who had taken delivery of many expensive yachting gizmos over the years, and acquired prestige as a result among the little fraternity of motor yacht chauffeurs.

But my father, always impatient with chat, was unpacking the box that came with the time machine.

“A few bits and pieces here in case there’s any trouble. These little torch things give out blinding coloured light and make a deafening sound. Here’s a couple of laser guns. These cylinder things here, they’re small force shields. You strap them on your belt. If things get hairy you press this button and it sets up a protective field around you. There are modern weapons that could get through it but I’m assured that arrows, bullets and spears don’t have a chance.”

Han turned back to the time machine.

“How on earth does it work?” he wondered.

“No idea, but then I’ve never understood how a TV set works either,” shrugged my father, the owner of the planet’s largest broadcasting company and its second largest electronics manufacturer. “That’s for the boffins. The important thing is how you use it!”

“So where are we going to go?” asked Dad, later that evening, after a meal under the stars, moored off a Turkish beach. “What are the big events in this part of the world? You tell us Alex, you’re the one with the history splice!”

I felt hi-jacked. That was what I wanted to say. I’d been quite happy just wandering around the blue sea in the two dimensions of horizontal space, and letting my imagination do the rest. I didn’t need this time travel gimmick. It was like someone barging in with a house-sized chocolate cake, a stripper and a brass band when you are enjoying a quiet little dinner for two.

But I recognised I was in a minority of one on this, so I moderated my lack of enthusiasm and confined myself to merely putting a damper on the proceedings.

“You know,” I said, “people always want to go back to the big showy set pieces: the crucifixion, or the sack of Jerusalem, or the fall of Troy or something. But that isn’t really what history is all about. Those are just the earthquakes, the very occasional explosions when the tensions build up and have to be released. Almost all of history is really just people going about their daily lives. If I’m going to go back in time I’d rather just visit some ordinary little place and see what ordinary life was like for them.”

Dad gave an outraged roar.

“Of all the prissy, priggish rubbish! What utter nonsense ! Come on now, Alex, you mentioned Troy, isn’t that somewhere round here? That’d be something! We’ll go back to the sack of Troy.”

“Troy! Wow!” breathed Han. “Think of that Alex!”

“That’s the spirit, Hannibal!” Dad exclaimed, and turned to me. “I thought this guy was a drip when you first brought him home, Alex, I make no bones about it. But it looks like he’s got more spirit than you have.”