Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

Later Victor spends some time wandering the busy Kreuzberg streets, reluctant to return to Franz and Renate’s apartment. He feels embarrassed by his earlier outburst and by the fact that he simply walked away and abandoned the two of them, embarrassed, now that it is over, by his evening with the old philosopher in his squalid little bachelor’s lair.

He passes VR arcades, video galleries. He passes an establishment which he suddenly realises is a brothel staffed by specially adapted synthetiks . He walks quickly past.

Three police cars whoop by, heading eastwards to put the lid back on some outbreak of mayhem in Lichtenberg.

I’ll stop for a drink and wait until Franz and Renate are in bed, Victor decides. Sort it out in the morning.

He turns into a street called Moritzstrasse. (“Empire of Charlemagne!” exclaims a poster put up by the Carolingian party for the recent senatorial elections. They stand for a smaller unified Europa consisting of France, Germany, Lombardy and the Low Countries – the area of Charlemagne’s long-dead empire. Tired old Europa is rummaging in the attic of her own history for ideas, but the ideas are stale and empty. No one votes for the Carolingians. Those who turn out for elections vote dutifully for Federation, the Market and the Social Compromise.)

He finds a small bar and orders a glass of red wine. There is a TV on in the comer showing an extended news programme about the anticipated bloodbath in Central Asia.

Victor sips his wine and looks around the room. In the far comer a young man is fighting chimeras in a small head-and-hands VR machine. A fat red man at the bar is loudly extolling the virtues of half of one percent reduction in interest rates, currently the hot issue in Europa’s political life.

At the next table, a woman about Victor’s own age is sitting by herself. She is very beautiful, it suddenly seems to him. She has a particular unselfconscious grace that is all her own. As Victor admires her, she unexpectedly turns and sees him, meeting his eyes for a moment and giving him a small wistful smile.

Victor looks away hastily, takes another sip from his glass.

But suddenly he is aware of the three warring principles of the Cassiopeians struggling for control within his mind.

“Go over to her!” says Valour.

“What about Lizzie?” says Gentleness.

“If it’s sex you want,” says Evil, “why not just go back to that synthetik place? It would be a loss less trouble and there’d be a lot less potential for embarrassment.”

But Valour is insistent.

“Go over!” says that unfamiliar voice, “Go over before the moment passes!”

Victor is terrified. Never in his whole life has he ever done anything as audacious as to approach a beautiful stranger in a bar. He and Lizzie only went out together after months of working side by side. Even now, after years together, their sexual life is so crippled by fear and inhibition as to have hardly even begun.

“Go!” says Valour.

Grasping his wineglass firmly, Victor stands up. He clears his throat. He tries to assemble in his mind a coherent opening sentence. (The entire German language seems to be rapidly deleting itself from his brain…)

“Ich… Sie…”

She smiles delightedly and Victor grins back, amazed, only to realise that she isn’t smiling at him at all…

“Clara! I’m sorry to be late!” says a big blond man from behind him, crossing the room and embracing her.

The clenched wineglass shatters in Victor’s hand. He feels an excruciating stab of pain. Blood wells from a deep gash between his fingers.

Clara looks round. Everyone in the bar looks round – some amused, some puzzled, but all a little afraid. There is a crazy man here clutching a broken glass. What will he do next?

What can he do? Staring straight ahead of him, dripping blood, Victor stalks out into the cold street. No one challenges him to pay his bill.

KILL ALL WOPS, says a scrawl on the wall opposite.

EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE, says another.

KEEP BERLIN TIDY, says a municipal sign.

But, just over the rooftops, unnoticed, washed out by the city lights but still just visible, the universe shines down, with the W-shape of Cassiopeia there in the midst of it.

From somewhere up there, fainter than gossamer, fainter than the silvery tenuous voices of the stars, whispers the Cassiopeian signal. It is a ripple from a single tiny pebble dispersing slowly across an enormous ocean, yet even at this distant shore it still bears the unmistakable signature of its origin. It is still a message. It is still purposeful. It is still without question the product of intelligent minds.

“Valour?” says Victor to those unreachable minds, nursing his copiously bleeding hand. “Valour is it? Do you realise you lot have just made me look like a complete idiot with that Valour nonsense of yours!”

He chuckles a bit at this, then laughs out loud.

And then crashes unconscious to the ground.

Clara and her blond brother Hans are the first to come to Victor’s aid where he lies flat on his face on the cold Kreuzberg pavement, under the frosty stars.

“We need to do something about that hand,” says Clara. “He’s lost an awful lot of blood.”

This is a typical view of Apirania. Prairie country, the occasional bowava tree and here and there a hill standing out from the plain. But do you see that hill over there in the distance? That is actually a town on the top of it, a walled Apiranian town. It looks just like rocks doesn’t it? Like part of the landscape.

Here’s a closer view of the town. It’s called Formara. Lydia and I got to know it quite well. The layout of it is pretty much the same as all the towns there: high walls, a single gate. You can see a couple of sentries up there on top of the walls. We’re too close to the walls to see much of what’s inside, but Formara is built along a single road that rises in a spiral from the gate to the Motherhouse at the top. You can just see there the top of the Motherhouse.

I know: it’s all the same reddish colour, the walls, the hills, the houses.

This is a bowava tree. Now these have got to be seen to be believed. This picture gives no idea of the scale… Wait a minute, yes, this is better. That tiny speck down there, believe it or not, is me. These trees are immense and they pollinate in an extraordinary way. You see these orange things along the branches? Can you see they are above the branches and not below them? Well, they’re balloons. Natural balloons. They rise up into the stratosphere and then burst, dispersing pollen over… well, I don’t know… most of the planet I should think.

This is a mootha . Moothai in the plural. Quite a beast, eh? But not indigenous, actually. It’s a modified version of a terrestrial animal from prehistoric times: a brontotherium. The colonisation of Apirania coincided with what you might call the rococo period of genetic engineering back here. Reconstructed brontotheria were introduced as the main beast of burden. Enormous, lumbering beasts. Those tusks look nasty, but moothai are as docile as can be.

No, Apirania has no large indigenous animals.

And these are some Apiranian children. Sweet aren’t they? They all just loved having their picture taken. The boy here is Karl, the only boy in the family, and this is his sister Kara. This is Suka, this is Bavvy, this is Yar. Yes I know: they could be your next door neighbours, couldn’t they? Apiranians look pretty much like us. The chromosomal differences between us and them are quite profound but their effects aren’t really visible in the children at all.