Turing Test Read online

  “Don’t forget your coffee,” he said as I rose from the chair.

  “Right.”

  I had various ways of disposing of the food and drink I took in for the sake of appearing human, but I hated waste, so I took a long swallow and shunted the coffee into a clean holding unit I could drain for eBeth later. She claimed that it was even better reheated.

  Back in the main office, the restore process was around sixty percent complete, so I pretended to be as entranced by the progress bar as your average human and got going again on my weekend forecast for Kansas City. You’d think that predicting the weather for a landlocked place would be easy, but it doesn’t work that way, and I’ve been competing in a contest sponsored by the cable weather channel to see who can offer the most accurate forecasts there over the full winter. We’re graded on high, low, and average temperature, precipitation, and severe weather events, like thunderstorms, hail, or tornados.

  I’m currently in second place behind some farm kid who actually lives there, which I think is cheating, though he probably doesn’t have access to the same military radars and spy satellites I’m tapped into. You can think of it as a battle between man and machine. I crunch the numbers while the kid bases his forecasts on how the animals act and the way the air feels. Thanks to the prize, there are 21,939 people participating in the contest, so being in second place is no small feat.

  An hour later, I was done at the police station and had detected a blind spot in the radar grid that could theoretically allow a foreign power to slip in a nuke designed to maximize an EMP burst in the high atmosphere. I wasn’t worried about that, but the coverage hole shaved about point two percent off the reliability of my weekend forecast. I figured that filing an anonymous report with the proper military agencies was just begging for trouble, so instead I did a little remote programming during my drive home and fixed it for them.

  Four

  I was diligently working on a report update when I heard the dog whining and scratching at the front door. It was unlikely that he wanted to go out at two in the morning, so that could only mean one thing. I turned the handle slowly in case eBeth was already asleep with her back to the door, but Spot had picked up on her presence almost immediately.

  “You can let yourself in, you know,” I told her for the third time in a month. “You have a chip-key.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she said sleepily. “What would people think about a teenage girl going into your apartment in the middle of the night?”

  “If the neighbors see you in the hall sleeping against my door, they’ll think I got you in trouble and threw you out,” I countered.

  “What?” eBeth came wide awake and turned red. “Ew. I meant that I didn’t want to get you in trouble if your supervisor suddenly shows up or something. It’s not like I can say I was taking care of the dog in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m not supposed to have a dog,” I told her, going to the closet and retrieving a blanket for the couch. “Don’t worry about me. Observers all work on the honor system and there’s nobody watching us.”

  “You don’t have a boss?”

  “I report to my world’s current representative on the League’s executive council. But an advanced AI isn’t going to decant into a fake human body just to come and check up on me. Our mission to evaluate Earth for membership probably seems like a dragged out process to you, but in our terms, the whole thing will be over in a blink of the eye.”

  Loud laughter came from across the hall and I turned down my audio gain so I wouldn’t have to listen to it.

  “Why does my mom do that to herself?” eBeth asked angrily, though I could tell she didn’t really expect an answer. “He’ll just leave in the morning and probably steal something on the way out.”

  I gave Spot a nudge with my foot and followed it up with a, ‘Go over there and make yourself useful,’ look. The dog was happy to oblige since it involved two of his favorite things in the world, sleeping on the couch and eBeth. The two of them settled in and I draped the blanket over them. For a creature covered with hair, Spot was strangely sensitive to the cold.

  “Thanks, Mark,” she said, burying her face in the dog’s neck.

  I turned off the light and went back into the bedroom, picking up the report update where I’d left off. After tens of millions of years, the Observation Service had developed a series of universal fill-in-the-blank forms for grading the achievements of candidate populations. Observers were given some leeway in determining which forms were relevant to their study, but the bean-counters expected detailed explanations of every decision. In the end, it was almost as tedious as cracking public key encryption systems. The sun seemed to take forever to put in its morning appearance, and I went out to wake eBeth for school.

  “I’m not going,” she said flatly.

  “You can’t just drop out of school,” I told her. “You might want to go to college when you’re older and they won’t take you if you haven’t graduated high school.”

  “Actually, they will. I can just take a bunch of tests if I want to go, but what’s the point? It’s not like the Vrixian Coherence recognizes academic degrees from Earth.”

  “I never should have told you about the Vrixians. I thought it would inspire you to go to school.”

  “It did. It inspired me to go to one of their schools.”

  I gave up. “Eat some breakfast before you take Spot out. And I’ve got a cup of Roaster’s if you want to reheat it.”

  “Thanks. Just think of all the food you’d waste trying to maintain your cover if you didn’t have me and Spot to help.” eBeth went into the kitchen and poured the remains of a box of dry cereal into a bowl, sniffing at the milk from the fridge before adding it. Then she micro-waved some scraps I brought home from The Portal, just to take the refrigerator chill off, and put them in the dog’s dish. She saved reheating the coffee and slicing a banana over the top of her cereal for last.

  “Don’t you miss eating?” she asked me after a couple of minutes.

  “How can I miss something I’ve never done?”

  “But you have to consume energy,” she reasoned. “Does electricity come in flavors?”

  “Not exactly. So what are you going to do all day if you don’t go to school?”

  “I’ll come with you. I want to see how you recruit Jason.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you about that either,” I said, more to myself than to eBeth. “The other members of my team have started referring to you as my secretary.”

  “Shouldn’t I get paid then?”

  I could have pointed out that she was eating my unused groceries and drinking my recycled coffee, but to be fair, I had gotten into the habit of letting her take care of tasks that required a physical presence. I suspected that my team members were all giving her small jobs as well, but I didn’t want to know.

  “All right, you can come with me this morning and see how it goes with Jason. Maybe having you there will actually help, but I’m driving.”

  She exchanged a triumphant look with the dog as if they had planned it together, and for all I know, maybe they did. Twenty minutes later, we were stuck on the highway in one of those flash traffic jams, in this case caused by a Christmas tree on the road. I guess the guy thought that gravity would keep it in the bed of his pickup, even with the tailgate down. Either that or he had planned it as a way to get rid of the tree now that the holidays were over. eBeth honked the horn impatiently.

  “Never draw attention to yourself when you’re doing something illegal,” I told her. “I shouldn’t have let you drive in rush hour.”

  “It’s part of being your secretary,” she retorted. “The steering wheel didn’t shake at all when I hit the brakes. Paul did a good job.”

  “Stop changing the subject. Get the driver’s permit questions from their website and I’ll pay for the test.”

  “Really? Don’t you have to be seventeen?”

  “Sixteen. You’d know all this stu
ff if you ever went to school. You’ll need your mother to sign the form.”

  “I signed my report cards for years before I stopped going so I guess I can sign this too. Oh, look. The right lane is open now.”

  “That’s the breakdown lane,” I told her as she swung to the right and accelerated past the jam. “You can get a ticket for this.”

  “But our exit is right here. I’m just getting off early.”

  “eBeth. We have to talk—”

  “I’m sorry, I won’t do it again,” she interrupted, attempting to look contrite at the same time.

  “This isn’t about your driving. My meeting with Jason is a serious thing for him and you can’t interrupt with questions every minute.”

  “I’ll be good,” she promised. “What are you going to do if he isn’t interested?”

  “Offer him a job repointing the foundation. It really needs doing.”

  “That would be a huge step down from restoring a church, wouldn’t it?” eBeth asked as she took the exit ramp and headed for the restaurant.

  “That’s one of the reasons I’m hoping he’ll go for my offer. Jobs like the church don’t come up very often because there just aren’t that many stone buildings in town and they’re well built. And I think it would do him good to have a real change of scenery.”

  “You mean from his ex-wife.”

  “That too,” I admitted.

  Despite the traffic jam we were still ten minutes early, but Jason’s beat-up old pickup was already there. He got out with two coffees when we pulled up and gave eBeth an apologetic look. “Sorry, kid. I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll have his leftovers.”

  “Thanks for coming, Jason.” I gave his calloused hand a carefully calibrated shake.

  You might be surprised, but shaking hands was one of the most difficult challenges I encountered in passing myself off as human. Without that arcane ritual, I could have gone for years at a time without touching anybody on this planet, even accidentally. The first few times I shook hands with people they looked at me funny. One small business owner who had called me for a quote on a point-of-sale computer even told me he couldn’t trust a man with such a limp handshake and wished me well. I went to a major trade show in the city a few days later where I had the opportunity to shake hands with so many salesmen that I finally got the hang of it.

  We both turned at the series of beeps from the keypad as eBeth unlocked the restaurant’s side door.

  “Good little helper, isn’t she,” Jason commented. “Shouldn’t she be in school though?”

  “You try convincing her,” I told him as we followed in eBeth’s footsteps. “I invited her to sit in on our meeting this morning, but if it bothers you…”

  “No, I’m just surprised you didn’t bring the dog.”

  “He had a long night,” I explained, drawing a funny look from the stonemason. “My office is in the basement.”

  eBeth was already there sitting quietly in the corner when I showed Jason in. He cast a professional eye over the old lime mortar that was turning into sand between the courses of brick.

  “They make some new caulk types you could try if you don’t want to go the full repointing route,” he said, which was either a brilliant negotiating tactic or a gentle way of telling me he wasn’t interested.

  “That’s not why I asked you to come in, Jason.”

  “You said you had a job for me. Something challenging.”

  I took a bottle from the deep file drawer of my desk and poured a shot. “I know this is going to sound funny, but I want you to drink this for me.”

  “Tequila? At 7:30 in the morning?”

  “I recycled the bottle. This is something to keep you from remembering the conversation.”

  “I don’t know, Mark,” Jason said after a moment’s hesitation. “You’re a nice guy and you run a decent place, but…”

  “I’ll drink one too,” eBeth offered.

  “Does this have anything to do with all of the staff turnover around here?” Jason asked in a sudden flash of insight.

  “That it does,” I admitted.

  “And it’s why you were sounding me out last week on whether I would move for work, even if it meant the other side of the world.”

  “Like Australia, sort of.”

  “Oh, what the hell.” Jason took the glass and threw back the contents. “If you’re planning to chop me up into little pieces and bury me in the corner, I guess you can just pull out a gun and shoot me. It’s not like anybody would hear it down here.”

  “What I’m about to tell you may sound a little unbelievable at first, which is why I wanted to have the conversation in my office where I could give you a demonstration. The drink you just swallowed takes effect almost immediately. It simply prevents you from forming new long-term memories until it wears off in around a half an hour.”

  “So you’re going to tell me stuff and I won’t remember two minutes later?” He snorted. “What’s the point of talking then?”

  “You’ll remember long enough to make a decision, and you’ll probably be able to recall coming down here, having this conversation, and then it will just be fuzzy. But so far everybody I’ve asked has taken the offer, so the forgetting part didn’t matter.”

  “What’s the pitch?”

  “I’m an artificial intelligence construct from another world.” I was forced to wait while he dissolved in laughter, and I glared at the girl when she joined in. eBeth just waved a hand in front of her face and failed to regain her composure. “Fine,” I continued. “Watch this.”

  I picked up the empty shot glass he had replaced on the table and crushed it in my hand, increasing the pressure and pouring in heat until it liquefied. After showing the molten lump to my audience, I rolled it out between my palms, did a little quick shaping, and pulled a tail from the back just before it solidified. I blew on the finished product and held it out for their inspection.

  “What is it?” eBeth asked.

  “A manta ray,” I told her, disappointed that it wasn’t obvious.

  “It would have worked better with darker glass,” Jason said, but he was looking at me now rather than the glass fish. “I’ve seen magicians do some pretty unbelievable things. You might have had the manta ready and switched it when we were distracted.”

  “I’m not going to peel away my skin to demonstrate I’m not human because it’s too much work to restore it without the right equipment. How about I do this?” I activated the portal and brought up a view of the construction site on Hopi Seven. “That’s not a picture. It’s really just a few steps away.”

  “And you came all the way to Earth in search of cheap construction labor?” He was trying to sound sarcastic, but I’m pretty sure I had him hooked from the moment I zoomed in on the flying buttresses.

  “Technically speaking, the recruitment of skilled labor from your planet isn’t part of my job description,” I told the stone-mason, omitting to say that it actually went against the rules. “I couldn’t help myself in your case, especially when I know how much you would benefit from a change of scenery. I worked some time as a labor agent before I got tapped for my current assignment.”

  “Which is?”

  “Evaluating humanity for membership in the League of Sentient Entities Regulating Space. My mission is to help determine your world’s starting level. We’re going to be announcing our presence to the world in a few months, but you would be the first human on this job, so you’ll be first in line for species foreman when more people get work there.”

  “And your space empire needs stonemasons?”

  “Good stonemasons, of which you are one. I took the liberty of making a series of images over the course of the year while you were doing the restoration work on the church and I sent them all to the cathedral. They’re prepared to offer you an initial five year deal for—well, if you converted the value into gold at the current exchange rates and brought it back to Earth, it
would come to over two hundred thousand a year.”

  “Dollars?” His voice hit a higher note than one might have expected from a barrel-chested man.

  “Yes. There are no payroll taxes where you’ll be going, and your employer provides all the necessities for living onsite. I have to warn you, though, that until they get more humans, the food will be rather bland.”

  “What difference does the number of us make?”

  “It’s easy enough to synthesize a diet that will keep you healthy, but I’ve only been sending your people off-planet for a couple of years, and in small numbers. There’s been no economic reason for food scientists on other worlds to put in an effort catering to human tastes. If a number of you go to the same spot, you’ll be given a bio-isolated garden allotment and help growing vegetables. Believe it or not, tomatoes and cucumbers are much harder to synthesize than meats.”

  “And if I turn you down and walk out of here?”

  “You’ll forget this conversation. Of course, there’s still the repointing job if you want it.”

  The contrast between the old bricks framing the portal and the soaring cathedral surrounded by scaffolding decided him.

  “There’s nothing keeping me around this town other than having nowhere else to go. I’m game, but I can’t just take off without putting my junk in storage and paying some bills.”

  “I have people who will take care of all of that, Jason. I’ve also made a video recording of this conversation which will serve as your contract.” I handed him a disposable tablet with the video already loaded. “It will play automatically once every five minutes until you cancel it, so you don’t forget why you’re standing on an alien world. You may feel a little light-headed at first because the oxygen content on Hopi Seven is higher than Earth’s. The gravity is about sixteen percent lower, so between the two, you’re going to feel like a superhero.”

  “What about my truck?”

  “I can put it in storage or dispose of it and bank the money for you.”