Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

Perimeter of Field!

There was nothing he could do but to stand and watch the white deer trotting away to wherever it was that it was going.

Out in the orange glow it turned round and looked back in his direction. And now, oddly, for the first time it seemed distinctly alarmed. Had it finally noticed his existence, Lemmy wondered? And if so why now, when several times it had let him come up close enough to touch it and not seemed concerned at all? Why now when it had been happy to lie in a road and be kicked?

But whatever it was that had frightened it this time, the deer now turned and fled in great skips and leaps.

And as it crossed from the orange glow of the lights into the flickering, empty-channel nothingness, it disappeared.

“I’m sorry. You were watching him, weren’t you?” said a woman’s voice. “I’m afraid it was me that scared him off.”

Lemmy looked round. The speaker was tall, extremely ugly and much older than anyone he had ever seen or spoken to – yet she was very high-res. You could see the little marks and creases on her skin. You could see the way her lipstick smeared over the edges of her lips and the coarse fibrous texture of her ugly green dress.

“Yeah, I was watching him. I’ve been following him. I wanted to know where he was going. I’ve been following him half-way across London.”

“Well I’m sorry.”

Lemmy shrugged. “He would have gone anyway I reckon. He was headed in that direction.”

He looked out into the blankness in the distance.

“What I don’t get though, is what that is out there and how come he just vanished?”

The woman took from her pocket a strange contraption consisting of two flat discs of glass mounted in a kind of frame. She placed it in front of her eyes and peered through it.

“No he hasn’t vanished,” she said. “He’s still out there, look, just beyond the fence.”

She clicked her tongue.

“But will you look at that big hole in the fence there! I suppose that must be how he got in.”

“ I can’t see him,” Lemmy said.

“Just beyond the wire fence look. In front of those trees.”

“I can’t see no fence. I can’t see no trees neither.”

“Oh silly me!” the old woman exclaimed. “I wasn’t thinking. They’re beyond the consensual field, aren’t they? So of course you wouldn’t be able to see them.”

Lemmy looked at her. She was so ugly, yet she behaved like a famous actress or a TV presenter or something. She had the grandness and the self-assurance and the ultra-posh accent.

“How come you can see it then? And how come that animal can go out there and I can’t?”

“It’s a deer,” she said gently, “a male deer, a hart. The reason it can go out there and you can’t is that it is a physical being and you are a consensual being. You can only see and hear and touch what is in the consensual field.”

“Oh I know it’s just physical,” Lemmy said.

“ Just physical? You say that so disparagingly! Yet once every human being on earth was physical.”

Lemmy pretended to laugh, thinking this must be some odd, posh actressy kind of joke.

“You don’t know about that?” she asked him. “They don’t teach you about that at school?”

“I don’t go to school,” Lemmy said. “There’s no point.”

“No point in going to school! Dear me!” the woman exclaimed – and she half-sighed and half-laughed.

“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.