Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“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 , Clarissa. 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.