Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“You know her do you?” a man asked me. “Well, you want to do something about her, mate. She’s nuts. She’s mental. She needs help.”

I didn’t respond. I had never known how to speak to these people, so manifestly unreal and yet so obviously alive. I both despised and envied them. How tawdry their constructed world was and how craven their meek acceptance of it. Yet how narrow and dull my own world was by comparison, my bleak garden, my clipped hedges, my book, my nightly glass of port, my weekly sally down the road to the Horse and Hounds, the Last Real Pub, to drink Real Beer with the diminishing band of decrepit and barren old men and woman who call themselves the Last Real People.

“She needs locking up more like,” said a woman. “That’s the same one that blocked the Northern Line last month with her carrying on. I saw her face in the paper.”

I picked my way through the traffic.

“Alight Clarissa,” I called coldly as I came up to her, “I’m here again for you. Muggins is here again as you no doubt expected he would be. I’ve come to fetch you home.”

“Muggins? Who’s that?” she quavered. She was afraid it was one of the Agents.

“It’s just me, Clarissa. It’s just Tom.”

“It’s who?” muttered Clarissa, straining to see me.

“He said Tom, dear,” Lily told her.

Clarissa glanced sideways at the cartoon face with its little black dot eyes and its downward curved mouth. Then Lily vanished again, along with the whole Field, and Clarissa was back in the dark physical world. But the lights of my car were there now and, without the distraction of the Field, Clarissa could clearly see me approaching as well as the Agents around me, waiting to step in if I couldn’t resolve things.

Awkwardly, wincing with pain, she rose to her feet.

“I just wanted to see the lights again, like they were when I was a child,” she said stubbornly.

And then she began to spin round on the spot like children sometimes do in play, but very very slowly, shuffling round and round with her feet and grimacing all the while with pain. And as she revolved, the faulty switch on her implant continued to flicker on and off so that, for a few seconds the bright lights and the buses and the cars span around her, and then it was the turn of the darkness that was the source of her coldness and her pain, and it was the dim cold walls of the empty buildings that moved round her, lit only by the headlights of my car.

Lily appeared and disappeared. When she was there the Agents vanished. When she vanished, they appeared. The one constant was me, who like Clarissa could both feel the physical cold, and see the consensual lights.

“Come on Clarrie,” I said to her gently. “Come on Clarrie.”

The old lady ignored me for a while, carrying on with her strange slow-motion spinning and singing a tuneless little song under her breath. People were craning round in cars and buses to look at us. Pedestrians were standing across the road and watching us as frankly as if this really was a Circus and we were there expressly to put on a show.

Then abruptly Clarissa stopped spinning. She tottered with dizziness, but her eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cornered animal.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Who exactly are you?”

It was odd because in that moment everything around me seemed to intensify: the sharpness of the cold night air in the physical world, the brilliance of the coloured lights in the consensual one, the strange collision of the two worlds that my Clarrie had single-handedly brought about… And I found that I didn’t feel angry any more, didn’t even mind that she’d brought me all this way.

I switched off the implant behind my ear, so that I could check up on what the Agents were doing. But they were still standing back and waiting for me to deal with things.

“It’s me, Clarrie dear,” I said to her. “It’s Tom. Your brother.”

The Agent nearest me stiffened slightly and inclined its head towards me, as if I had half-reminded it of something.

“I reckon you’ve had enough adventure for one day, my dear,” I told my sister, flicking my implant on again to shut the Agents out of my sight. “Enough for one day, don’t you agree? Don’t mind the Agents. I’ve brought the car for you. I’ve come to take you home.”

She let me lead her to the car and help her inside. She was in a very bad state, trembling, bloodless, befuddled, her injured foot swollen to nearly twice its normal size. I was glad I had thought to bring a rug for her, and a flask of hot cocoa, and a bottle of brandy.

That strange moon-faced creature, Lily, a human soul inside a cartoon, followed us over and stood anxiously watching.

“Is she alright?” she asked. “She’s gone so strange. What is it that’s the matter with her?”

“Yes, she’ll be alright. She’s just old and tired,” I told her, shutting the passenger door and walking round the car to get in myself.

I flipped off my implant, cutting off Lily and the sights and sounds of Piccadilly Circus. In the dark dead space, the four Agents were silhouetted in the beam of my headlights. They had moved together and were standing in a row. I had the odd idea that they wished they could come with us, that they wished that someone would come to meet them with rugs and brandy and hot cocoa.

I got my sister comfortable and started up the car. I was going to drive like she always did, with my implant deactivated, unable to see the consensual traffic. I didn’t like doing it. I knew how arrogant it must seem to the consensuals and how much they must resent it – it was things like that, I knew, that gave us Outsiders a bad name – but I just couldn’t risk a broken axle on the way home on top of everything else.

“Really, we’re no different when you come to think of it,” said Clarrie after a while. Her implant was off at that moment and she looked out at abandoned streets as lonely as canyons on some lifeless planet in space. “ That’s the physical world out there, that’s physical matter. But we’re not like that, are we? People are patterns. We’re just patterns rippling across the surface.”

“Have a bit more brandy, Clarrie,” I told her, “and then put the seat back and try to get some sleep. It’s going to be some time before we get back.”

She nodded and tugged the rug up around herself. Her implant switched itself on again and she saw a taxi swerve to avoid us and heard the angry blast of its horn. Briefly the busy night life of the Consensual Field was all around her. And then it was gone again.

“Just the same,” she said sleepily. “Just like the lights in Piccadilly Circus.”

Memorial Day.

I got out of bed and opened the window. Birdsong rippled through the mild creamy air and a fat old woman pushed her bike up from the allotments with its basket laden with a spring harvest of leeks and sprouting broccoli.

“Morning has broken, like the first morning…”

She was singing that old hymn.

Well, yes, I thought. I suppose it is on days like this that we should thank God for all Her munificence: for light, for air, for sunlight, for the great dance of the planets and stars… But let us not forget to mention tuberculosis too, and beriberi and cholera and TTX.

(TTX. Ah yes, now, there is proof, if any more were needed, that God is truly a She !)

I pulled on my jumper and jeans and struggled into my specially adapted boots.

And do I thank God for my feet? I demanded. Do I thank Her for the curse of being born a boy? Do I thank Her for my good kind reasonable parents, who have cut me off from the whole world with their good intentions, their damned principles?