Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

She lifted the coffee cup to her lips and took a sip.

“I’m Lily,” Lily said helpfully, staring wonderingly at the intricate wrinkles all over Clarissa’s hands, and at the brown liver-spots on them, and the way they trembled all the time so that coffee keep sloshing out down the sides of the cup. If Lily’s low-res looks were short on detail, Clarissa seemed to possess detail in reckless abundance. And yet – and this was the part that puzzled Lily – it was to no apparent decorative purpose. That look must have cost a fortune, Lily thought, but why would anyone choose to look like that ?

“I’m Clarissa, my dear. I’m Clarissa Fall,” said the old lady grandly, finishing her coffee and shaking the drips out of the cup before screwing it back onto the top of the flask.

“Do you know the way?” Lily ventured. “Do you know the way to Piccadilly Circus?”

“ I should think so,” Clarissa snorted. “I’m over two hundred years old and I’ve lived in London since I was born. I’m the last physical person left in London, you know.”

She looked at her watch. She craved company and attention and yet when she actually had it, she was always curiously impatient and off-hand.

“Oh. Two hundred,” repeated Lily humbly. “That’s quite old. Only otherwise I was going to suggest I could come and show you the way…”

“Yes, do come by all means,” said Clarissa magnanimously.

The laws of the physical universe prevented physical people from riding on virtual vehicles, but there was nothing in the rules of the Field to prevent virtual people from riding a physical car. The only difficulty was that the invalid car was only designed for one, so Lily had to ride at the back on the little rack intended to carry bags of shopping.

“I don’t mind,” said Lily, who couldn’t afford dignity. “It’s not that far.”

“I’ll have to turn my implant off, I’m afraid,” Clarissa told her, “so I can see the bumps on the road. You won’t be able to talk to me until we’re there.”

“I don’t mind,” said Lily gamely. She had no idea what Clarissa meant, but she had long since accepted that life was largely incomprehensible.

Clarissa turned the key to start the car. As she did so she noticed the meter that showed the remaining charge in the battery. When she set out, the needle had pointed to ‘Fully Charged’, but now it was on the edge of the red area marked ‘Warning! Very Low!’ She allowed herself for a single moment to see the trouble she was in – and to feel fear – and then she pushed it firmly from her conscious mind.

Clarissa drove slowly down Tottenham Court Road. The shop buildings were dark and empty, their windows blank, or sometimes broken and full of dead leaves. The roads were bare and strewn with rubble. Apart from the whine of her electric car and the click of stones thrown up by its rubber wheels, there was utter silence.

But Lily saw windows full of goods for sale, cars and buses all around them, and people everywhere.

“Nearly there!” she called out cheerfully, still not fully grasping that Clarissa with her implant inactivated couldn’t hear her or sense her presence in any way. Then she gave a little shriek as Clarissa nonchalantly swerved across the road directly into the path of oncoming traffic and carried on down the wrong side of the road, magnificently indifferent to honking horns and shouts of indignation.

“She’s physical,” Lily called out by way of explanation from her perch on the back of Clarissa’s little car. “She’s just physical.”

Half-way along Shaftesbury Avenue, the battery gave out and the car died.

And now Clarissa was scared. It was getting towards evening; it was turning very cold; and she was an elderly woman with an injured foot in the middle of a ruined city. She had nowhere to stay, nothing to eat or drink, and no means of getting home.

But Clarissa was good at pushing things out of her mind.

“It’s not far,” she muttered, referring not to the fake chateau, her distant home, but to Piccadilly Circus which still lay ahead. Piccadilly Circus offered no warmth, no nourishment, no resolution at all of her difficulties, but all of that was beside the point. “I’ll just have to walk,” she said. “It’s absurd to come this far and not get to see it.”

She dismounted from her car and began, painfully, to limp the last couple of hundred metres, but then she remembered Lily and stopped.

“ I’M GOING TO WALK THE LAST BIT! ” she bellowed back, assuming correctly that Lily was trailing behind her, but erroneously that Lily’s invisibility made her deaf. “ I CAN’T SEE YOU because MY IMPLANT’S TURNED OFF and I don’t want to turn it on again until I get there, or it will SPOIL THE EFFECT .”

She had it all planned out. She would not turn on her implant until she was right in the middle of the Circus.

“ YOU’RE VERY WELCOME TO COME ALONG THOUGH! ” she shouted, as if she personally controlled access to the public streets.

She hobbled forward a few steps along the silent ruined avenue (while in the other London, cars swerved around her, pedestrians turned and stared and Lily patiently plodded behind her as if the two of them were Good King Wenceslas and his faithful page).

“I’ll tell you what though,” Clarissa said, pausing again. Her face was screwed up with the pain of her injured foot, but her tone was nonchalant. “If you felt like calling the council and asking them to get hold of someone physical to come and help me out, I would be grateful… Only my dratted car has QUITE RUN OUT OF POWER you see, so it’s not going to be able to get me back.”

“I don’t have any money,” said Lily. “Is it an emergency do you think? Shall I call the emergency number?”

But of course Clarissa couldn’t hear her.

It was getting dark as she limped into Piccadilly Circus. The buildings were inert slabs of masonry, all those thousands of coloured light bulbs on the old advertising signs were cold and still, and the statue of Eros was more like the angel of death on a mausoleum than the god of physical love.

Some gusts of rain came blowing down Regent Street. Clarissa’s lips and fingers were blue with cold and her whole body was trembling. (Lily was amazed: she had never seen such a thing, for consensuals are never cold.) Clarissa was in great pain too – the broken bone in her ankle had slipped out of place and felt like a blade being twisted in her flesh – and she was tired and hungry and thirsty. Too late she realised she had left her flask of coffee behind in her abandoned car.

“You’re a fool, Clarissa Fall,” she told herself. “You don’t look after yourself. One of these days you’ll just keel over and the rats will come and eat you up. And it will be your own stupid fault.”

Then she remembered her low-res companion.

“ ARE YOU STILL THERE LILY?” she bellowed. “Did you make that CALL FOR ME ? I’m just going to get across to the statue there and then I’ll turn my implant on and WE CAN TALK .”

She hobbled to the base of Eros and then reached up to the implant switch behind her ear. The colour, the electricity, the teeming life of a great city at night came flooding instantly into the desolate scene. There were people everywhere, and cars with shining headlamps and glowing tail-lights, and black taxis and red double-decker buses full of passengers, lit upstairs and down with a cheery yellow glow. But above all there were the lights , the wonderful electric streams of colour that made shining moving pictures and glittering logos and words that flowed across fields of pure colour in purple and red and green and yellow and blue and white.