Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

Even the jugglers, when she saw them again, seemed weary, as if they longed to let the clubs fall to the ground and leave them to lie there in peace.

“Surprise yourself!” said the woman beggar, right in front of her.

Jessica gave a little cry of shock, not just because she was startled, though she was, but also because for a moment she felt as if she was looking into a mirror and seeing her own reflection. But once having collected herself she realised this face was altogether leaner, and had different and deeper lines in it. She is not like me at all, thought Jessica taking out her purse, except superficially in the hair colour and the eyes. And the hair was thinner, the eyes more bloodshot.

But the beggar said, “We could be sisters couldn’t we?”

Two jet fighters hurtled by above them.

Jessica pressed bank notes into the beggar’s hands.

Well I could have a sister, Jessica thought as she hurried back to the gallery. It’s not impossible.

She had met her natural mother once, a haggard icy-hearted creature called Liz.

“Brothers or sisters?” her mother had said. “You must be joking . I had my tubes done after you. No way was I going through that again.”

But Liz could quite well have been lying. She’d struck Jessica as a woman who spoke and believed whatever seemed at that particular moment to further her own ends. In that one meeting Liz had given Jessica three different accounts of why she had given Jessica up, discarding each one when Jessica had presented her with contradictory facts she’d read in her file.

Then again, the files had not mentioned a sister either.

At six o’clock Jessica went back down Red Lion Street to look for the beggar, but she wasn’t there. She drove home through North London and lay awake planning to search the homeless hostels and the soup kitchens, all over London if necessary, all over England. The beggar had a West Country accent she thought. Like Liz, who came from Bristol.

In the morning, after she’d parked the car, Jessica went down to the end of Red Lion Street again, and again at lunchtime. She spent half the afternoon in her office in the gallery phoning hostels and charities and welfare agencies, asking how she would go about finding someone she had met in the street. They all said they couldn’t tell her anything. Jessica could have been anyone after all: a dealer, a blackmailer, a slave trader looking for a runaway. And anyway Jessica couldn’t even give a name for the woman she was looking for.

She nearly wept with frustration, furious with herself for not finding out more when she met the woman yesterday. And now it seemed to her that if she could find the blonde beggar again it would be the turning point of her whole life. That’s no exaggeration, she thought. If necessary, I really will give the rest of my life to this search. This is my purpose, this is the quest which I’ve so long wanted to begin.

When she went down Red Lion Street for the third time, though, the beggar was there again – and this turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It had really been far too short a time for this to have been a satisfactory life’s quest. And anyway, when it came down to it, who was the beggar but just some stranger? Once again, Jessica thought, I’ve blown up a great big bubble of anticipation, and she would have walked away from the whole thing at once had she not known herself well enough to realise that, as soon as she turned her back, she would immediately want to begin again.

So she made herself go forward, even though she was full of hostility and resentment.

“We could be sisters?” she demanded.

The beggar woman looked up, recognising Jessica at once.

Yes!” she exclaimed, and she appealed to her male companion. “Look Jim. This is the woman I was telling you about. We could be sisters don’t you reckon?”

The man looked up.

“Yeah,” he said indifferently, “the spitting image…”

Then he really looked.

“Fucking hell , Tamsin! You’re right. You could be fucking twins .”

Jessica felt dizzy, as if she had taken a blow to the head.

“Tamsin?” she asked. “Tamsin? Is that your name?”

“Yeah, Tamsin.”

“Tamsin’s my name too. My middle name. The name my mother gave me before she had me adopted.”

Tamsin the beggar gave a small whistle.

“We need to talk, don’t we?” said Jessica. “There’s a coffee shop over there. Let me buy you some coffee and something to eat.”

“Coffee and something to eat?” said the male beggar. “Yummy. Can anyone come?”

“Fuck off Jim,” said Tamsin.

A powerful helicopter crossed very low over the street. It was painted dark green and armed like a tank.

In the coffee shop Jessica said, “Could we really be sisters?”

“No chance,” said Tamsin, “my mum had herself sterilised right after I was born.”

“But how old are you?” asked Jessica.

“Thirty three.”

“When is your birthday?”

“April the second,” said the beggar. “ What? What’s the matter?”

Jessica had gone white.

“It’s mine too,” she said. “April the second. And I’m thirty-three. We must be twins.”

Tamsin laughed.

“We’re not you know.”

“Same name, same birthday, same looks, I’m adopted. What other explanation can there be?”

“I’ve never heard of twins with the same name,” said Tamsin.

“Well no but…” Jessica was genuinely at a loss.

“Haven’t you ever heard of shifters you posh git?”

“Shifters?”

Jessica had heard of them of course. She’d never knowingly met one. The word had eerie, uncomfortable connotations. People said shifters moved sideways across time by taking some kind of drug. She’d heard it came in pills they called ‘slip’ or ‘seeds’. A few years ago there had been something of a moral panic about shifters and there had been talk about how they were a mortal threat to law and to civilisation and to humanity’s whole understanding of its place in space and time. But oddly people seemed to have rather forgotten about them since then. It was like flying to the moon, or having conversations with people on the far side of the world: impossible things happened and people soon got used to them (though in the case of shifters there were still those who maintained the whole phenomenon was some sort of elaborate hoax).

“ I’m a shifter,” said Tamsin. “I don’t come from this world. I must have been in a hundred worlds at least.”

“But if you don’t come from this world how can…?”

Tamsin made an exasperated gesture. “Don’t you get it? I’m not your twin. I am you. You and me were once the same person.”

For some reason Jessica leapt to her feet with a small cry. Everyone in the coffee shop looked round. She sat down again. She stood up.

“Give me your phone a minute,” said Tamsin.

Like most pocket phones at that time, Jessica’s had a security lock which could only be deactivated by her own thumbprint. Tamsin pressed her thumb on the pad and they watched the little screen light up.

Jessica couldn’t bear to stay still.

“Let’s go out,” she said. “Let’s walk in the street.”

The world splits like cells on agar jelly. Just in the short space of time you’ve been reading this, countless new worlds have come into being. In some of those worlds you’ve tossed this story aside already. In others you have been interrupted by the phone, or the doorbell, or a jet plane crashing through the ceiling. But it seems that you – this particular version of you – were one of the ones who carried on reading.