Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“Hi Jessica,” Elsie said to Tamsin. “Have you had a good day?”

Tamsin dropped her glass.

“What the fuck? ”

The electronic face furrowed with concern.

“Are you okay, Jessica. You look very pale. Is everything alright?”

Tamsin looked to the real Jessica outside the doorway for support. Jessica laughed.

“Don’t worry Tammy, it’s only a computer graphic.”

She came into the room, identified herself as the real Jessica, and told Elsie to shut herself down.

“Creepy,” muttered Tamsin as the screen blanked.

“You’re right,” said Jessica. “I think it’s about time I uninstalled her.”

She went for a cloth to mop up the spilled wine.

“That computer can’t have come cheap,” Tamsin said looking round, while Jessica cleared up the mess, at the elegantly minimal furnishings, the shelves of art books, the signed painting on the wall. “What the fuck do you do to get all this money?”

“I manage an art gallery.”

“What, paintings and that?”

“Not many paintings actually. Body pieces mainly these days.”

“What?”

“Pieces made from human bodies.”

“Ugh.”

“Listen Tammy. Don’t do any more shifts. Stay with me. Please. Promise me you will. I’ll look after you. I’ll make everything alright for you.”

“Have you got a bath? I’d really like a bath.”

“Of course. And take some of my clothes. They can be our clothes. I’ll change too. We could have a bath together and dress the same. Let’s see how alike we are when we dress the same. Let’s take pictures of ourselves together.”

They slept together that night in Jessica’s double bed. Tamsin went to sleep very quickly. It was a long time since she had lain down in a real warm bed after a bath with a belly-full of food. Like some small forest animal, she had learnt to exploit such moments when they came.

Perhaps she’s not like me at all, thought Jessica suddenly in the dark, listening to Tamsin’s wheezy breathing. A person’s body and brain were just empty vessels waiting to be filled, or so the earnest doctors had told her. Personality was in the programming, not in the machine. What did a shoot ‘em up game and a word processor have in common just because they could be run with the same hardware? This was a complete stranger lying beside her: a dangerous, unpredictable interloper who, in a moment of madness, she had brought into the safe zone and into her flat and her bedroom and her bed – yes, and then made extravagant promises to as well: ‘Stay with me. I’ll look after you. I’ll make everything all right.’ What had she been thinking? Had she gone completely mad?

But then she thought: yes, but the same things made us laugh. She and I both noticed it. We noticed each other noticing it. So there is something in common. Whatever the different paths we have travelled, deep down Tammy and I are still the same.

But then she thought: why I am so obsessed anyway with finding someone who is the same ? Why this constant obsessive longing for a soul-mate? Suppose I did find someone who was identical to me in every way. Wouldn’t that just be another way of being alone?

Tamsin whimpered in her sleep.

“Tex! Don’t do that!” she pleaded with someone in her dream. “Please! Please! Please! … You’re scaring me Tex. Oh shit, no! Please! ”

“It’s okay sweetheart,” whispered Jessica. “It’s okay Tammy. You’re only dreaming. You’re safe here with me.”

She took Tammy in her arms. Tenderness such as she had never felt came welling up in the darkness. She remembered Tammy’s body in the bath, thin and pale, worn and scratched and bruised, with dozens of deep scars where Tammy had cut herself with razor blades and knives and broken glass. What sort of pain would you need to have suffered to make you do that to your own flesh?

What did it matter how alike or unalike Tammy was to her? The point was that they were connected. They were inextricably connected.

Next morning, as it happened, Britain embarked on a war. Few people even remarked on it. It took place in a small country far beyond the imaginative universe of most British people. Even the brave warriors themselves fought from ten thousand metres up and never once saw the faces of those they attacked.

A war had begun. What last night had been solid buildings in that small faraway country – houses, offices, factories – this morning were scattered stones and bricks and bits of wood. On TV, if Jessica had chosen to watch it, the safely returned warriors were being asked how they felt (‘How was it for you?’ ‘Was it your first time?’ ‘Was it like what you expected?’) But Jessica didn’t watch TV and, though she woke abruptly with a sense of loss and dread, it came from quite another source. She was alone. While she slept, Tamsin had gone.

“Tammy!” cried Jessica, leaping out of bed, but she already knew what she would find: her purse emptied on the floor, her money gone, the front door left open, no note, no explanation…

Jessica threw on some clothes. She wasn’t angry. She knew that Tamsin had gone to buy ‘seeds’ and she understood this perfectly, for she knew that, if she had been the one that had woken first and had found Tamsin still there, then she would have resented the intruder, and it would have been her who would have been desperate to put distance between them.

She ran out into the street.

“Tammy! Tammy!”

It was 7am. Only a few people were about, most of them workers – LSN-vetted workers – who travelled into the Zone from far away to make the cappuccinos and empty the dishwashers and clean the streets. They observed Jessica with surprise. A Turkish newsvendor setting up his stand paused and asked her if she was alright. Jessica ran past him to the gate.

“Are you running round in circles?” asked the LSN guard. “It was only twenty minutes ago you last ran through.”

He frowned.

“And weren’t you wearing red last time?”

Jessica arrived an hour late at the gallery. She hurried through that pure white space in which each exhibit was isolated and quarantined by a frame, by glass, by a neatly printed label: a preserved human face, a self-portrait made in blood, a scribbled page from a diary reproduced in relief on a slab of marble, a row of grainy snapshots of an ordinary London street, elaborately framed and labelled with Roman numerals like the stations of the cross…

Barely even speaking to her secretary, she shut herself away in her office and went at once to her PC to download the photographs she had taken the previous night. There they were on the screen, a dozen pictures of Tammy, in Jessica’s bath robe, in Jessica’s pyjamas, laughing and pulling faces and striking poses.

She clicked the print icon. She gathered up the printed images one by one as they emerged and then laid them out on her desk. Last night, when she and Tamsin had been together what these twelve pictures showed had been reality. But now each of them had already become an object in its own right, separate from the past, separate from each other, separate from Jessica, separate above all from Tamsin.

Jessica felt nothing. She moved the photos this way and that on the desk, over and over again, trying different arrangements, as if she thought she might find a pattern, a resolution, if only she tried long enough.

On the first day I thought I’d go and see the David at the Accademia, but what really caught my imagination there wasn’t the David at all but the Captives. You’ve probably seen pictures of them. They were intended for a Pope’s tomb, but Michelangelo never finished them. The half-made figures seem to be struggling to free themselves from the lifeless stone. I liked them so much that I went back again in the afternoon. And while I was standing there for the second time, someone spoke quietly beside me: