Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

Yet she was already getting eagerly to her feet.

Lemmy followed them up the wide marble staircase to the first landing. Progress was slow. The old man, who for some reason was carrying the camera with him, had to pause several times to rest and catch his breath.

“Let me carry it, Terence!” Clarissa said to him impatiently each time. “You know you don’t like the stairs.”

“I’m fine,” he wheezed, his face flushed, his eyes moist and bloodshot. “Don’t fuss so.”

On the landing there were three glass cases, the first containing fossil shells, the second geological specimens, the third a hundred dead hummingbirds arranged on the branches of an artificial tree. Some of the little iridescent birds had fallen from their perches and were dangling from strands of wire; a few lay at the bottom of the case. The old man hobbled on to the second set of stairs.

“Here’s another sensor,” he said, glancing, just for a moment, back at Lemmy.

He laid down the camera, stood on tiptoes and, gasping for breath, reached up to rap at something with his knuckles. It was a bit like the wind in the trees again. Lemmy could clearly hear the hollow sound of some hard surface being struck, but all he could see was Terence’s liver-spotted hand rapping at thin air. And when Lemmy stepped forward himself and reached up into the same space, he could find nothing solid there at all.

“Terence disconnected this sensor once,” said Clarissa. “Very naughty of him – we had to pay a big fine – but he unplugged it and…”

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll unplug it now,” Terence said, reaching out. “I’ll unplug it now and show this young fellow how his…”

And suddenly there was no staircase, no Clarissa, no Terence, just a flickering blankness and a fizzing rush of white noise. When Lemmy moved his foot there was nothing beneath it. When he reached out his hand there was no wall. When he tried to speak, no sound came. It was if the world had not yet been created.

Then a message flashed in front of him in green letters:

Local sensor error!

…and a soothing female voice spoke inside Lemmy’s head.

“Apologies. There has been a local sensor malfunction. If not resolved in five seconds you will be relocated to your home address or to your nominated default location. One… Two… Three…”

But then he was back on the stairs again, in Clarissa’s and Terence’s decaying mansion.

“Reconnect it now Terence!” Clarissa was shouting at her husband. “ Now! Do you hear me?”

“Oh do shut up you silly woman. I already have reconnected it.”

“Yeah,” said Lemmy, “I’m back.”

“I’m so sorry, Lemmy,” Clarissa said, taking his arm. “Terence is very cruel. That must have been…”

The old man had already turned away and was labouring on up the stairs.

On the second landing, there was a case of flint arrow-heads, another of Roman coins and a third full of pale anatomical specimens preserved in formaldehyde: deformed embryos, a bisected snake, a rat with its belly laid open, a strange abysmal fish with teeth like needles… Between the last two cases there was a small doorway with a gothic arch which led to the foot of a cramped spiral staircase. They climbed up it to a room which perched above the house in a faux-medieval turret.

The turret had windows on three sides. On the fourth side, next to the door, there was a desk with an antique computer on it. In the spaces between the windows there were packed bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Books and papers were stacked untidily on the desk and across the floor, most of them covered in thick dust.

“Terence’s study,” sniffed Clarissa. “He comes up here to do his world-famous research, though oddly enough no one in the world but him seems to know anything about it.”

Terence ignored this. He placed his glass contraption on his nose and groped awkwardly behind the computer to find the port for the camera lead, snuffling and muttering all the while.

“Are you sure you want to see this Lemmy?” asked Clarissa. “I mean this must all be a bit of a…”

“ There we are,” said the old man with satisfaction as the monitor came to life.

He carried the camera to the North-facing window, and propped it on the sill. Lemmy followed him and looked outside. He could see the garden down below with its ice-green lights and its fountains and roses. Beyond it was the procession of orange lights and signs (one sign for every five lights) winding to the West and to the East that marked the edge of the city. Beyond that was the empty space, the spare-channel void, flickering constantly with random, meaningless pinpricks of light.

“You won’t be able to see anything through the window,” said Terence, glancing straight at Lemmy for a single brief moment. “You’re relying on sensors and they won’t show you anything beyond the Field. But of course the room sensor will pick up whatever’s on the monitor for you because the monitor is here in the room.”

Lemmy looked round at the monitor. The old man was fiddling with the camera angle and what Lemmy saw first, jiggling about on the screen, was the garden immediately below. It was different from what he had just seen out of the window. The lights were still there, but there were no roses. The ground was bare concrete and the ponds were bald empty holes. Beyond the garden, the lights and warning signs around the perimeter looked just the same on the screen as they had looked out of the window, but beyond them there was no longer a complete void, no longer the flickering blankness. The tall chain link wildlife fence was clearly visible and, beyond that, night and the dark shapes of trees.

The old man stopped moving the camera about and let it lie on the sill again so that it was pointing straight outwards. And now Lemmy saw on the screen a large concrete building, some way beyond the perimeter. Windowless and without the slightest trace of ornament, it was surrounded by a service road, cold white arc-lights and a high fence.

“ That is where you are, my friend,” said the old man, leaving the camera and coming over to peer at the screen through his glass discs. “That is the London Hub, the true location of all the denizens of the London Consensual Field. You’re all in there, row after row of you, each one of you looking like nothing so much as a scoop of grey porridge in a goldfish bowl.”

“Oh honestly Terence!” objected Clarissa.

“On each of five storeys,” Terence went on, “there are two parallel corridors half a mile long. Along each corridor there are eight tiers of shelving, and on each shelf, every fifty centimetres, there is another one of you. And there you sit in your goldfish bowls, all wired up together, dreaming that you have bodies and limbs and genitals and pretty faces….”

“Terence!”

“Every once in a while,” the old man stubbornly continued, “one of you shrivels up and is duly replaced by a new blob of porridge, cultured from cells in a vat somewhere, and dropped into place by a machine. And then two of you are deceived into thinking that you have conceived a child and given birth, when in fact…”

“Terence! Stop this now !”

The old man broke off with a derisive snort. Lemmy said nothing, his eyes fixed on the monitor.

“Of course you’re wonderful for the environment,” Terence resumed, after only the briefest of pauses. “That was the rationale, after all. That was the excuse. As I understand it, two hundred and fifty of you don’t use as much energy or cause as much pollution as one manipulative old parasite like my dear Clarissa here – or one grumpy old fossil like me. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there isn’t much more to any of you than there is to one of those pickled specimens I’ve got down on the landing there, or that your lives are an eternal video game in which you’ve been fooled into thinking you really are the cartoon characters you watch and manipulate on the screen.”