Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

He got out tobacco and dope and started to roll up. We were sitting at the stern under the canopy. Mehmet was washing the fore deck, keeping, as always, carefully out of our way.

“So where next?” said Han, pausing before lighting up. “That was just incredible ! Your Dad is incredible. This has been the most incredible trip of my entire life.”

“I think I’ll pass on the smoke,” I said.

“High enough already, eh?” said Han. “You’re right. I’ll save it for later. Maybe we should get some sleep and then think about where we’re going?”

“Actually I think I’ll get Mehmet to drop me off at Izmir and I’ll get a plane home.”

“Oh.” He was dismayed. “I thought we were carrying on for another fortnight at least.”

“Yes, well, sorry. The bubble has sort of burst. You can carry on if you want. Dad seems to have left his time machine behind, so you can use that too.”

“All on my own, eh? That’ll be fun.”

“It’s up to you.”

Then Han turned on me.

“Christ, Alex, what’s the matter with you? Look at you, you get a luxury yacht to play with, you get a temporal navigator, you get stuff most people can only dream of. And what do you do with it all? You get in a sulk and walk away. It’s true what people say about you. I’ve always stood up for you before but I can see now they’re right. You’re spoiled. You’re just plain spoiled.”

I shrugged and went to give Mehmet his instructions.

I could hardly wait to be off the Croesus and sitting on a plane back to London.

What I would do then exactly, I still wasn’t quite sure, but I knew there were things.

I’d see a doctor for a start, and get the splices cut out of my head.

The first time Lemmy Leonard saw the white hart it was trotting past a sweet shop on Butcher Row at ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning. He’d never seen such a thing and would have certainly followed it there and then if he hadn’t seen PC Simon approaching. Lemmy was supposed to be in school and the authorities were having one of their crackdowns on truancy, so he had to slip down a side road until the policeman had passed by. When he emerged the deer had gone.

It was strange how bereft that made him feel. All day the sense of loss stayed with him. He had no words for it – he never spoke or thought about such things – no way of explaining it at all.

“Are you okay Lemmy darling?” said his mother that night as she brought him his tea. (She looked like a Hollywood starlet, but without the overweening vanity) “Only you seem so quiet.”

It was raining outside. You could tell by the faint grey streaks that crossed the room, like interference on a TV screen.

The second time he saw it was outside a pub off the Westferry Road. It was two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and he was with Kit Rogers, Tina Miller and James Moss. He really wanted to follow it then, but Kit had just that minute suggested they all go into Grey Town and if Lemmy had proposed something else it would have looked like he was afraid.

“Not Grey Town!” pleaded Tina. “I hate that creepy place.”

“Are you saying you’re scared?” asked Lemmy with a sneer.

“No I never but… Oh alright then, just so long as we don’t meet that beggar. You know, the one who hasn’t got any…”

“No, he’s always on the same corner these days, over on the Blackwall side,” said Kit with a sly look at James. “You won’t see him if we go in on this side.”

Lemmy and his friends were Dotlanders. They were low-res enough to have visible pixels and they only had 128 colours apiece, except for James that is, whose parents had middle-class aspirations and had recently upgraded to 256. There were all low-res, and up in the West End they would all have looked like cartoon characters – even James – but down in Grey Town they looked like princes, the objects of envy and hate.

It was like descending to Hades, going into Grey Town and finding yourself surrounded by all those grainy, colourless faces. There were outline faces, even, faces with ticks for noses and single lines for mouths. Greyscale hustlers tried to sell them things, black-and-white dealers tried to do deals, dot-eyed muggers eyed them from doorways and wondered how much of a fight these Dotland kids would put up, and whether they had anything on them that would make it worth finding out. And then from the darkness under a railway arch came the sound that Tina dreaded and that Kit and James had tricked her into hearing

“Bleep!”

Tina screamed.

“You said he was over by Blackwall!”

The boys laughed.

“You bastards! You set me up on purpose!”

“ Bleep!” went the darkness again and a plain text message appeared in green letters in the black mouth of the arch:

Help me! Please!

Guiltily each one of them tossed a few pence of credit in the direction of this unimaginably destitute being who could afford neither a body nor a voice.

“I really hate you for that, Kit!” Tina said. “You know how much that guy creeps me out!”

“Yes, but that’s why it’s so much fun winding you up!”

And then they saw the white hart again, trotting through the streets of Grey Town.

“There it is again,” said Lemmy, “let’s go and…”

But once again there was a distraction, this time a commotion further up the street. A small crowd of young Greytowners were heading their way, laughing and jeering around an immensely tall, solitary figure with an unruly mane of long white hair who was striding along in the midst of them, like an eagle or a great owl being mobbed by sparrows.

They recognised him as Mr Howard. He was a big landlord in Grey Town and across the East End, and he came in occasionally to look over his properties, always wearing the same crumpled green velvet suit in true colour and as high a resolution as it was possible to be, with real worn elbows and real frayed cuffs and the true authentic greasy sheen of velvet that has gone for months without being cleaned.

What was fascinating and disturbing about Mr Howard was his imperial disdain and the way he strode through Grey Town as if he owned the place. He actually did own quite a lot of it but that was only one reason for his regal manner. The other reason was the absolute invulnerability that came from his being an Outsider. Sticks and stones would bounce off Mr Howard, knives would turn. No one could hurt an Outsider, or even stop him in his tracks.

“Spook!” yelled a tiny little black-and-white boy from the kerb with his little outline mouth. “Mr Howard is a spook!”

“Peter! Over here! Now!” hissed the little black-and-white woman who was his mother.

The little boy looked round, smiling triumphantly until he saw her fear. Then he burst into tears and went running back to her. And the two of them, the two little low-budget animated drawings of a mother and a child, cowered together in the shadow of a doorway while Mr Howard strode by.

Lemmy looked around for the white hart. But it had gone.

About a week later Lemmy and the others were hanging round Dotlands Market, checking out the stalls selling low-res clothes and jewellery and shoes (“Never mind the resolution, look at the design!”) the equally low-res food stalls (“It might look low-res, darlin’, but do you buy food to look at? The flavour is as high-res as it gets!”) and the pet stores with their little low-res cartoon animals (“These adorable little critters have genuine organic central nervous systems behind them, ladies and gents! Real feelings like you and me!”)