Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

“This is my favourite too.”

I turned smiling. Beside me was a robot.

I had noticed it in the morning. It was a security guard, humanoid in shape and size, with silver eyes and a transparent skin beneath which you could see tubes, wires, sheets of synthetic muscle…

“Move out of my way!” I said. (You know how it is? Like when you say Hello to an ansaphone? You feel like an idiot. You need to establish the correct relationship again between human and inanimate object.) “Move out of the way,” I snapped. “I want to stand there.”

The automaton obediently stepped back and I moved in front of it, thinking that this would be the end of the encounter. But the thing spoke again, very softly.

“I am sorry. I thought you might understand.”

“What?”

I wheeled round angrily.

But the robot was walking away from me.

You know how Italians drive? Round the corner from the Accademia some idiot in a Fiat took it into his head to try and overtake a delivery van, just as a young woman was stepping out into the road. He smashed her into the path of the van, whose left wheel crushed her head.

A wail of horror went up from the onlookers. One second there had been a living woman, the next only an ugly physical object, a broken doll: limbs twisted, brains splattered across the tarmac…

I waited there for a short while, dazed and sick but thinking vaguely that they might want me for a witness. Among the bystanders an appalled and vociferous debate was building up. The Fiat driver had hit and run, but strangely the recriminations seemed to centre not on him but on the robot driver of the delivery van, which remained motionless in the cab, obviously programmed in the event of an accident to sit tight and wait for human instructions.

“La macchina,” I kept hearing people say, “La macchina diabolica.”

One forgets that in all its gleaming Euro-modernity, Italy is still a Catholic country.

I went back to the hotel.

It was one of those cheap mass-market places. Through the little window of the lift, you could see that every floor was identical: the same claustrophobically narrow and low-ceilinged corridor, the same rows of plywood doors painted in alternating red, white and green. The delayed shock of the road accident suddenly hit me and I felt almost tearfully lonely.

“Ninth floor, Signor,” creaked the tinny voice of the lift.

I went down the windowless corridor from number 901 to number 963 and opened the door, dreading the empty anonymous room. But Freddie was already there.

“Fred! Am I glad to see you!”

Freddie laughed. “Yeah? Beer’s over there Tom. Help yourself.”

He was lying on the bed playing with his Gameboy and had already surrounded himself with a sordid detritus of empty beer-cans, ashtrays, pizza cartons and dirty socks. He had the TV on without the sound.

My little brother doesn’t speak Italian and has no interest whatsoever in art. He had spent his day in the streets around the hotel, trying out bars and ice cream parlours and throwing away Euros in the local VR arcades. I told him about seeing the girl killed outside the Accademia.

“Jesus Tom, that’s a bit heavy. First day of the holiday too!” He thumbed back the ring-pull of another can. “Still, nothing you could have done.”

I had a shower and we went out for something to eat. We were just finishing off our first bottle of wine when I remembered the robot.

“I meant to tell you. A weird thing happened to me in a museum. This robot security guard tried to talk to me about one of the sculptures.”

Freddie laughed. “Probably just some dumb random choice program,” he said with a mouth full of spaghetti. “Easy to set up. Every hundred visitors or whatever it spins random numbers and makes one of a hundred possible remarks…”

“But this was the Accademia , Fred, not Disneyland!”

Fred shoved a big chunk of hard Italian bread into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of wine. “What did it say exactly?”

My brother acts like a complete dickhead most of the time – he is a complete dickhead most of the time – but cybernetics is his special interest. He reads all the mags and catalogues. He visits the chatrooms. His accumulated knowledge is immense. And by the time I had told him the whole story, he had stopped eating and was looking uncharacteristically serious.

“It sounds very much like you met a Rogue there, Tom. You’d better call the police.”

I laughed. “Come on Fred, you’re putting me on!”

“No really. Those things can be dangerous. They’re out of control. People can get killed.”

I got up (“I’m warning you. This’d better not be a joke!”) and asked to use the phone. The police said that regretfully cibernetica were not under their jurisdiction and I should contact the carabinieri. (What other country would have two separate police forces operating in parallel!) I phoned the carabinieri and got through to a Sergeant Savonari in their Dipartimento di Cibernetica . He took the whole thing alarmingly seriously. There had been several reports already, he said, about the same macchina. He asked me to stay at the trattoria and he would come out immediately to see me.

Somewhat shaken I went back to our table.

“Christ Freddie, I had no idea. I obviously should have contacted them this morning. Is it really likely to kill someone?”

Fred laughed. “No, not at all likely. But a Rogue is out of control. So you just don’t know what it’ll do.”

“So what is a Rogue exactly? Like a Robot that’s picked up a virus?”

“Not really. A virus is something deliberately introduced. Robots go Rogue by accident. It’s like a monkey playing with a typewriter. A sophisticated robot is bombarded with sensory information all the time – they’ve got much better senses than ours mostly – and every now and then a combination of stimuli happens by chance which screws up the robot’s internal logic, unlocks the feedback loops…”

“And the robot comes alive?”

“No it doesn’t ,” Freddie was irritated by my naivety, “no more than your electric razor comes alive if the switch gets broken and you can’t turn it off. It’s still just a machine but it’s running out of control.” He wiped tomato sauce from his plate with his last piece of bread. “Well if we’re going to have to wait here for this guy, you’d better buy us another bottle of wine…”

Savonari arrived soon afterwards, a small dark man with deep-set eyes and a great beak of a Roman nose. He shook us both by the hand, then reversed a chair and straddled it, leaning towards me intently across the remains of our meal. It was only after he had been with us for some minutes that I registered that he himself had a robot with him, standing motionless by the doorway, hammerheaded, inhuman, ready to leap into action in an instant if anyone should try and attack the sergeant, its master. (It was what the American police call a ‘dumb buddy’ – three hundred and sixty degree vision, ultrafast reactions, a lethal weapon built into each hand…)

Several people, it seemed, had witnessed and reported the robot’s attempt to converse with me in the Accademia – and seen it slipping away from the gallery soon afterwards – but no one else had been able to report the exact words spoken. Apparently my account confirmed beyond doubt that there had been a fundamental breakdown in the thing’s functioning, rather than, say, a simple hardware fault. The sergeant noted, for instance, that it had continued to try to talk to me when I had clearly ordered it out of the way.